October is here at last, and with it comes my annual dive into spooky reads. It doesn’t quite feel like fall in South Texas yet—the summer heat still hasn’t gotten the memo—but I’m determined to will the season into existence. Horror is a genre I enjoy all year, but when October arrives, my reading appetite shifts into overdrive. That’s why I was thrilled when the kind folks at Macmillan Audio sent me a copy of Sarah Gailey’s latest novel, Spread Me. It turned out to be the perfect book to kick off my spooky season.
Kinsey has been content leading a team of researchers at a remote desert outpost, far removed from the pull of civilization. For her, isolation is freedom, a life stripped of distraction and temptation. But everything changes when the team uncovers a strange specimen buried beneath the sand. Against protocol, Kinsey breaks quarantine to bring it into the facility. From that moment on, her carefully ordered world begins to fracture. The specimen exerts a pull she can’t explain, and the temptations she thought she’d left behind return with a force that can’t be ignored.
Spread Me finds Sarah Gailey leaning into body horror, temptation, and a strain of strange eroticism. At times, it reminded me of the film Splice, where a scientist develops an unhealthy attachment to their creation. The story can be cringe-inducing, silly, and even a bit over the top—but I couldn’t stop listening. Gailey writes with an urgency as infectious as the viral specimen at the heart of the novel. Is this highbrow, intellectual horror? Not at all. But it never pretends to be. Spread Me is pulpy, B-movie–esque horror that managed to both entertain and repulse me, which feels like the perfect way to kick off a month of spooky reads.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2025, 76)
