Following their 2022 entrance into the horror-thriller genre with Just Like Home, Sarah Gailey (The Echo Wife; Upright Women Wanted; Magic for Liars) again asks readers to confront the monster underneath the bed--except this time the bed is a desert, the monster is a shape-changing virus, and the confrontation comes with a hefty dose of sexual tension.
In Spread Me, Kinsey leads a small team of four scientists and a doctor at a remote research station in the middle of the desert. They're committed to one another and their work, coping with the extreme isolation and weather conditions with an unhealthy amount of booze, ever-rotating bedfellows, and a money jar that they pay into whenever someone references John Carpenter's The Thing. They all know the desert is alive beneath their feet, but the distance between knowing and seeing is erased when Kinsey decides to go against protocol and bring a living specimen inside the station. A crew member quickly falls ill, and the infection spreads throughout the station, with unexpected consequences. Because Kinsey has a secret attraction to viruses of all kinds, and this virus appears to want her back.
As the situation escalates, Kinsey wields her grief and anger as weapons while trying to fend off her heady desire for the virus, even as she careens toward a decision that will permanently change her life. Gailey's intriguing premise becomes an effective, propulsive novella, one that entertains even as it asks a weighty question: whether the effort of years spent resisting who one is and what one wants is ultimately what propels one toward surrender. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer