Guys, is this a romance?
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| cover art by Anders Røkkum |
There are two Sarah Gaileys. One writes whimsical romps about rootin-tootin hippo-riding cowpokes (hippo-pokes) who do heists, and queer anti-patriarchal librarians on horseback who do revolutions. The other writes . . . um . . . well, works like Spread Me.
Don’t get me wrong. I like both Gaileys. It’s just very important to know which one you’re getting before you dive into a work. This one is written by the second Gailey, the one who wrote Just Like Home. This is important information for setting expectations.
Spread Me is a slim tale, covering the misadventures of a
research group in a near-future American Southwest, where repeated
waves of pandemics have swept over the world and made a remote research
assignment deep in the desert, far away from other people and
contagions, look awfully attractive. Kinsey leads this research team,
funded by some vague Big Money organization to do some vague Biology
Research ™. The logistics and funding and motivation for her project are
simultaneously unconvincingly hand-wavey and also utterly irrelevant to
the primary story, which is about what she and her team find underneath the sands of the desert.
It’s a sex
pollen sex-virus-fungus-lichen thing. It’s a sex-microbiotum.
It’s a sexy shmexy microscopic hive mind crittur thing. Despite a whole entire scene with a microscope, the science is as unimportant as the funding
and project objectives. This book keeps its eyes on its prize: the
sex-critter spreads by infecting things, and it wants to infect Kinsey.
And although it seems to infect other people through incidental contact, with
Kinsey it is determined to be an STI. The only problem is, it hasn’t
quite figured out how to (a) make its hosts sexually attractive people,
and especially not to (b) Kinsey in particular, who has her own
particular tastes. She keeps bacteriophage macrophotography pinups behind her mirror for special alone time. Unfortunately, the crittur
doesn’t know this, so it needs to experiment.
Cue the sexy body
horror. How do you feel about a mouth-encrusted torso? A hand with a
tongue on it*? An armpit with a vagina in it?*** My book group loved it.
Kinsey also likes it – and that’s weird, because Kinsey typically finds
humans pretty meh. No capsids, you see. An insufficiency of flagella.
So is that her superpower? Does she escape infection by the power of being a microbosexual?
Hah,
not a chance! This book is not about defeating the evil sex infection
that wants to take over the world. This book is about owning your kink,
communicating with your partner about what you want, learning what they want,
listening to each other and figuring out what it will take to make a
relationship work. As my book group remarked, ‘Guys, is this a romance?’
It’s
certainly something. Gailey always takes the horrific and makes it
weirdly wholesome. There’s the occasional nod to conventionality here –
some very boring interstitial chapters that flash back to how the
research team met and coalesced, providing backstory and character depth
that in a horror book would lend poignancy to their eventual fates. But
if this is a romance, then what do we need with backstory focusing on
secondary characters, when all the interesting stuff is happening now,
between Kinsey and her body-modding love interest/horrifying
world-threatening parasitic infection?
This book is not for
everyone. I’m not sure it was for me. It definitely was for my book
group, though. So pay attention to your AO3 tags, my friends: This is one of
those Gailey books. Dead dove, do not eat.
You have been warned.
*but a cold tongue, because there are no lungs or breath attached**
**
Yes, I know that hands are warm whether or not they have tongues on
them! But remember – the science of warm-blooded bodies is not the point
here.
*** This was the point where I got on bluesky and started
yelling at Gailey directly, who responded with a polite series of emojis.
--
The Math
Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable (for some!) experience, but not without its flaws
Highlights:
- sexy body horror
- owning one's kink
- An appreciation of the value of communication in partners
References:
Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me. [Tor Nightfire, 2025].CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.
