Spread Me - Sarah Gailey
What if John Carpenter's The Thing was horny? That's basically the central question in Sarah Gailey's Spread Me.
This was the third book that I finished this year and is immediately my favourite book so far. I have previously read Magic For Liars by Sarah Galley and really enjoyed it. One of the things that really impressed me about Magic For Liars was how obvious it is that Gailey is a fan of the genre that they're working in. *Magic For Liars" is a gumshoe police procedural book that takes the tropes of that genre and places them into an urban fantasy/magic school setting, and plays with the expectations of both of those genres in really interesting ways that I think elevate both genres.
Spread Me does the same thing with alien infection body horror. This is very much The Thing, and it's very clear that Gailey knows that we know that this is just The Thing. In fact, the characters within the book make reference to The Thing very early on. But in referencing it, in winking to us and saying, "we all know what's happening here", Gailey is able to take the expectations that come with this sort of transformative body horror and do something really new and interesting and exciting with them.
I love genre fiction that shows me things I've never seen before, that makes me sit up and say, "what the fuck am I reading? What did I just watch?" while I'm experiencing it. That's what Spread Me did.
This novel is unashamedly horny. It is unashamedly interested in bodies, in the transformative nature of flesh, in the wet, dark places that a lot of fiction shies away from. Especially recently, in the past decade and maybe more, we've been in a culture where media has become decreasingly erotic. Sex is vanishing from film and from popular fiction. There's constant discourse around whether sex scenes are necessary, whether we 'need' to see characters having sex, whether it "advances the plot". Spread Me says, fuck that. Everybody in this book wants to fuck everybody and everything else, and it's going to be horrible. It's going tie in to the horror, and be inseparable from the horror.
There are scenes in here that I want to talk about so much. There are some moments that will stick with me for a long time, but I don't want to spoil it. There are moments and images in here that I've never seen before. If you read Spread Me, come and talk to me about it when you're done, so we can talk about those scenes.
I think a lot of body horror naturally gets compared to David Cronenberg, but a lot of people making that comparison forget that Cronenbergian body horror is inherently tied up with sexuality and with horniness. Crash and Crimes Of The Future just wouldn't be the films they are without the sex. This is a book for people who want Cronenbergian body horror. This is a book for people who love the second half of Tetsuo: The Iron Man just as much as the first half of Tetsuo: the Iron Man. It is tense, it is tight, it is sticky, it is wet.
Gailey's writing is great. There's a real economy of language here that makes it feel longer than it is, because there's so much packed into such a short amount of time. I wanted to stay with this book for much longer than I was able to, and I want to reread it immediately. I enjoyed it so much that I was initially reading it digitally and decided that I had to own it physically when I was about halfway through, so I ordered a copy before I was done and I finished reading it in the physical copy. It is the best kind of erotic horror the kind that will leave you feeling like you need a shower when you're finished. I highly recommend it.