Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the isolation and the way the desert keeps temptations from the civilian world far out of reach.
When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside. But the longer it’s there, the more her carefully controlled life begins to unravel. Temptation has found her after all, and it can’t be ignored any longer.
One by one, Kinsey’s team realizes the thing they’re studying is in search of a new host—and one of them is the perfect candidate….

IN A NUTSHELL
I loved reading ‘Spread Me‘. It’s beautifully written, immersive, original, emotionally-charged and more than a little strange. At the heart of the book is the secret, obsessive desire of Kinsey, the main character. A desire so unusual that even the object of her desire misunderstands it and so all-consuming that there is nothing she will not do to satisfy it.

I pre-ordered ‘Spread Me’ (2025) so I was able to read it on the day it was released. It was a wonderful but strange read.

Sarah Gailey took a premise that will feel comfortably familiar to anyone who has watched ‘The Thing‘ and takes it to interesting and unexpected places. She’s done more here than move the setting from the frozen north to the heat of the desert. She’s changed the orientation to the specimen brought into the research base, turning it from a deadly threat into an equally deadly opportunity and casting the main character not as the last barrier between humanity and disaster but as someone who has longed for the disaster.

The first thing that drew me into the book was how masterfully Sarah Gailey uses the first-person to tell the story and how well the narrator, Xe Sands, captures that voice.

Here’s the first note I made as I read the book:

“I’m eighteen minutes in. There hasn’t been a wasted second. It already has the claustrophobic, doom-laden atmosphere I remember from when I saw ‘Alien‘ for the first time in 1979. Sarah Gailey’s tight prose and Xe Sands’ perfect narration have my complete attention”

From the beginning, I was carried along by the outstanding prose. Sarah Gaily delivered a tight, clear, intimate, first-person account conveying a deep emotion sheathed in a complex and disturbing idea. The tone was present-day fever-dream laced with memories of a better, not irretrievable past that made the present-day harder to bear.

 The premise is bizarre but both plausible and terrifying. What the specimen is, what it can do and what it wants are all satisfyingly disturbing and would have been enough to power most horror thrillers, and it’s different enough that it doesn’t feel like the rehearsal of a familiar trope, but this story draws its power not from the specimen but from Kinsey’s reaction to the specimen. Just as the premise of a remote research station taking in an unknown specimen feels familiar to anyone who has watched ‘The Thing‘, a movie that the characters reference frequently, so Kinsey at first seemed like a character I’d met before: the rational, focused lead scientist who keeps a professional distance between herself and her team, even though her team are all on intimate terms with one another. Except, just as the specimen in ‘Spread Me’ does not have the same agenda or abilities as the specimen in ‘The Thing‘, Kinsey is not the typical scientist-as-leader-and-perhaps-hero that such stories require. Her professionalism is a mask she wears to hide how she really feels about the people around her. She is by nature a loner, and she is guarding a secret obsession she is certain no one will understand. 

Kinsey’s obsession powers the plot. It’s a strange but compelling obsession that Sarah Gailey brings to life as the core of Kinsey’s identity. Some readers may find the nature of obsession too odd and too disturbing to settle into, but for me, it felt like a raw need reluctantly revealed and eventually surrendered to.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Spread Me’. Xe Sands’ performance is first-rate.

---