Rating:

The Thing Reimagined – With a Disturbing Erotic Twist

Author: Sarah Gailey

Have you ever watched John Carpenter’s The Thing and wondered: what would this story be like if the alien was really, really horny? Well . . . apparently Sarah Gailey did . . . and Spread Me (double entendre evident) transforms the dark story of a people-replicating being into an erotic body-horror nightmare.

Spread Me centers around Kinsey, who leads a remote research outpost in the desert where her team researches the cryptobiotic soil crust before it’s all destroyed by Big Evil Company. This is a very isolated post with the team essentially stranded for years, doing their research while often being constantly locked into their habitat by raging desert sandstorms. Before one such storm, they make a strange discovery: a dead creature with the head of a coyote and six thick, furry legs. Kinsey finds this specimen with its empty, sand-filled eye sockets oddly alluring, and so they break protocol and bring it into the habitat right before the sandstorm imprisons them.

That’s when everyone starts to get sick, and before long, there is a quarantine in place. As Kinsey hears the retching of her crew in their quarters, she lies in her own, indulging in her secret pleasure: endless masturbation sessions while staring at the image of a magnified virus and imagining it penetrating all her cells and taking her over. This has long been her greatest desire, and she knows it will forever remain unrequited. But . . . will it?

Soon, the locked-in crew starts to change, Carpenter style. They look like her friends, but they are something different now, something both new and ancient, something that wants Kinsey just as much as she wants it. There’s just one little problem: it’s killing everyone and once it gets out, it will be the end of the world. So, save the world or have an orgy?

Spread Me is just a really, really, REALLY weird book. I honestly cannot stress just how weird it is, and I went in completely unaware of just what I was reading. I love alien horror/sci-fi/pandemic related horror stories, and I saw this recommended on Good Reads based on my recent indulgences in all those horror goodies. I only read the synopsis, which doesn’t in any way cover that this is a wet dream wrapped in a nightmare wrapped in some characters who need serious psychological intervention. It just posed this as the usual dumb scientist carelessly encountering a new life form. I was all there for that.

Before we’re even a few chapters in though, we have our main character furiously masturbating to the image of a virus, explaining that she has never sexually wanted humans. Just . . . what? In all fairness, Gailey’s gorgeous prose, which is highly sexualized yet also oddly lyrical, takes us into this obsession, but it is just so far outside anything we (read me) could understand. I never could form a bond or any empathy with Kinsey. It was just too bizarre. It didn’t help that Kinsey is busy with her own, ahem, pleasure while her crew suffers, and to hide her dirty little secret, she continues to endanger those around her. I was interested in the story because despite its sheer oddness, it was well told and definitely imaginative, but I couldn’t make any kind of emotional connection.

The other characters – of which there are a huge cast – are just afterthoughts. We have Domino, Mads (the doctor, basically), Jaques, and two female characters who are essentially interchangeable and whose names I forget. All of the characters have been spending their downtime getting very freaky with each other, changing partners like you’d change socks. Convenient, no? Only Kinsey isn’t involved, because who wants to have sex with humans?

We get some flashbacks to introduce the characters, but we don’t get any real personalization. All we know is that they are already 1000% horny all the time, there is a slight amount of negligible tension between a few of them, and that two of them go by “they/them” pronouns, which just makes it that much more confusing who we are talking about as people rapidly shift across the pages.

It doesn’t really matter though, because this story is about Kinsey, and as the monster slowly takes over crew member by crew member, her colleagues decide to hard-core seduce her. If the human form doesn’t normally lure her, how about adding a couple more mouths, turning a hand into a tongue, and adding a vulva under an armpit, for good measure? And the really bad thing is that Kinsey finds these changes appealing. But she has just enough human in her to feel kind of bad about this thing that is killing her friends to make them into mindless sex automata and the entire causing the world to end thing. Bummer.

What is really odd is that I was interested in Spread Me. I didn’t like anyone in the story, especially not Kinsey, but I wanted to know what the deal was with coyote-bug and what this entity was after (other than Kinsey’s climatic pleasure, of course). The atmosphere of the desert worked for me, and the beautiful writing glued me to the story even though I had so many questions (and everyone made horror-movie dumb decisions). I was into it, God help me. But let’s be clear, despite the hypersexualized tone and the repetitive soft-core turning rapidly hard-core porn seduction, this book isn’t “sexy” in the traditional sense at all. If anything, the sexualization adds to the disturbing nature and the bizzarro genre feel.

“We only know how to fuck things or kill things, or fuck things until we’ve killed them, or kill things until it feels like fucking them.”
― Sarah Gailey, Spread Me

In the end, I was unsure how to rate this story. The write-up does not make it at all clear that this is not your average horror novel. I thought I was getting The Thing, but what I got was a very messed up version of Lexx with body-horror thrown into the mix. I was interested to see where it went and oddly entranced by the story, but I doubt I’ll return to this author. Just a little too out there for my normal horror reading needs, but not a terrible story overall.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)