Review of Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

Last book of 2025, and one of the most blatantly smutty reads (I refuse to use the term “spicy” like I’m a 16-year-old girl) you’ll ever see me review on main. Spread Me is erotic horror. Let’s get that right. I don’t know why so many other reviewers are reacting with Shocked Pikachu Face; it seemed obvious to this aroace gal that’s what I was getting from the moment I saw the title, cover design, and description. Then again, maybe my twenty-two years of being chronically online has truly destroyed any sense of decency left to me. But I want to be clear and put this up front so that you can bail on this review and this book if this is not your thing.

OK, all the normies gone? Just us freaks? Good, let’s do this.

Everyone saying Spread Me is The Thing but hornier is basically correct, though I will be that pedant and point out the original Campbell novella was called Who Goes There?. Gailey blithely pays homage to this inspiration within the novella itself, a little lampshade before we get into the real twisted stuff.

Kinsey is the leader of a remote desert research station. On paper, her team is cataloguing this part of the desert prior to a corporation coming in and developing it. They’re recording, basically, anything worth finding before it gets destroyed. In actuality, Kinsey took the job because she wants to be an effective recluse. The novella alternates chapters between the horror-movie present and flashbacks where Kinsey meets and bonds with the rest of her team. Along the way, we get insight into Kinsey’s sexual hang-ups, which then feed into the main conflict and resolution of the story. It is very explicit.

I have been on a journey with Sarah Gailey. Each of their books has made me more excited for the next, which is why I was willing to take the leap with Spead Me: I knew Gailey would make it worth my while. Moreover, when you view this novella in the context of their oeuvre (at least, the two other books I have read), this story makes a lot of sense.

The journey we’re on is one of genre exploration. In The Echo Wife, Gailey blended science fiction with horror and suspense. The story is fairly straightforward, pretty unremarkable on the surface, yet going deep into questions of personhood ad power in the most honourable of SF traditions. Then, Just Like Home was creepier and weirder, involving a house with some kind of vague sentience and a serial killer to boot. Gailey’s turn to psychological horror should have been less interesting for me, yet I liked it more.

What both of those books have in common is a dedication to exploring what it means to be human, and beyond that, what it means to be an individual with embodiment. They do it in different ways, of course. Spread Me continues to ponder these themes. The cryptobiological organism lurking within these pages is very different from what most of us consider to be life. The monster’s actions, and the ending of the novella, speak to an intense need for connection, even at the expense of one’s bodily autonomy and perhaps individual consciousness (it is ultimately unclear whether the organism kills the people it duplicates or assimilates them).

Kinsey, our protagonist, is such a paradox. First, I wonder if her name is a nod to Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist who famously proposed his eponymous scale of sexual attraction from straight to gay (with an “X” for us off-the-chart asexuals). Obviously Alfred Kinsey’s research was questionable in its methods and therefore its validity—but for the time, his willingness to ask questions and actually consider sexuality a field worth studying was important. Likewise, today, queerness has become mainstream (even though queer people still face heavy discrimination), yet queer sexuality remains very trapped within a heteronormative, amatonormative framework. There is, if you will, an “acceptable way to be queer.” The most obvious example of that is bi and ace erasure and the assumption that everyone is straight (by default) or gay. A lot of “allies” are fine if you’re gay; that to them is “normal” enough, but if you fall outside of this new normative binary, then it’s suddenly harder for them to accept. This flattening of queerness is both social and political, and the Kinsey scale, outdated as it is, remains a potent reminder that sexuality is not a binary.

To that end, the attraction of Spread Me’s Kinsey to viruses is fascinating. It pushes the boundaries of acceptable queerness and kink in modern discourse (though fellow freaks will agree it’s relatively tame). More interesting from a science fiction perspective is how this hooks back into that motif of personhood. Are viruses even alive? Some scientists would argue that viruses aren’t actually life forms. I won’t get into it here, but you can see how this opens a whole box of questions ranging from consent to the emergent nature of consciousness: when did Kinsey’s paramour become self-aware? When it infected the coyote thing? When it took its first victim? Can we even point to a specific event, or is its consciousness a distributed, negotiable, fluctuating phenomenon? And what becomes of the entity we call Kinsey by the end of the story? Is it a subsuming of self, a transubstantiation of self, a joining of selves?

When I finished Spread Me, I regretted it wasn’t a full-length novel. Thinking about it, however, I understand why. Gailey doesn’t want to answer these questions. They leave a lot up in the air, not to frustrate us but to keep the possibilities alive, as great science fiction does. This is not a straightforward monster story, not even straightforward monster erotica. You can read it and enjoy it on those terms. My university-addled mind refuses to let me switch off, hence the over-analysis!

I called Kinsey a paradox earlier, so let me unpack that. She has isolated herself from the rest of humanity because she doesn’t trust herself. Gailey subtly and skillfully sketches a picture of a near-future world in which pandemics and epidemics have become common enough that masking, social distancing, etc., are basically the order of the day now. Kinsey, of course, can’t stand such measures because they make it harder for her to get close to the things she is most aroused by. She herself acknowledges that on a rational level it’s messed up and doesn’t make sense. So she pulled herself away from that. The flashback chapters are valuable, for they reveal how carefully Kinsey tried to construct a personal fiefdom free of temptation. There’s this wonderful line where Kinsey meets Mads for the first time and reflects that she was starting to like them despite not wanting to. Ultimately, Kinsey is a familiar paradox: someone who tries to set herself apart from others yet still craves connection.

I was also pleased with the diversity and depth of the other characters. Their role in the story isn’t really that big: they are monster fodder! Yet Gailey spends a lot of page space, comparatively, establishing their personalities and relationships, creating this cozy microcosm so that it’s all the more tragic when it rips apart.

Spread Me is dark and twisted and smutty. For some people, that’s going to be enough. It might even be too much. For me, though, what drew me to it and what keeps me thinking about it is the larger questions it asks about the nature of life, identity, and belonging. These questions are inextricably wrapped up in discussions of sexuality, attraction, and relationality, which is what makes erotic horror and body horror such fascinating genres. Gailey uses these genres with finesse and flavour.