Recently, Martin Cahill had the opportunity to chat with author Sarah Gailey (Magic for Liars, Just Like Home) to celebrate the release of their latest horror novel, Spread Me, which follows an introverted research scientist whose fascination with a mysterious specimen has devastating and infectious consequences…
Please enjoy their full conversation below!
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Spread Me
Martin Cahill: Thank you so much for joining me, Gailey! And congratulations on the impending release of Spread Me, a novel that when I saw the cover, read the copy, and that you were writing it, I felt a rock hit my stomach with that dread and excitement I get when it comes to horror. And then I read it, and well, let’s say I found a new bottom of dread in my stomach. How long has Spread Me been in the works, and when did its core concept start to slither into your brain?
Sarah Gailey: I started working on Spread Me in Spring of 2023. The concept started to take hold when I was in the mountains near Los Angeles, discussing a concern of mine with a loved one. There was a dynamic between us that I think happens in a lot of relationships, where—especially when she was feeling afraid or insecure—she tended to show me what she thought I wanted to see. In confronting the dynamic, I developed a fear. What if I was in love, not with a person, not even with her shadow—but with the shadow puppets she was making with their hands in order to entertain and enthrall me? What could be more awful than realizing you’ve fallen not for a person, but for a performance?
Later that evening, watching the snow fall into the darkness around the remote cabin we were in, I considered what it would be like to be isolated in that fear. To be trapped with someone you desperately want to know and love—but who is determined to trick you into loving them. Who believes that you want, or even need, to be tricked. Who cannot internalize the idea that you might want the real thing, and not the performance they’ve perfected.
It was the loneliest thing I could imagine. I sent my editor an outline a few days later.
Martin: This book is very much in conversation with John Carpenter’s The Thing, so much so that the movie becomes a direct reference among the team. There’s also plenty of resonance with any number of flesh-doppleganger-alien-body-hopping-swapping-and-more kind of stories. Where do you feel Spread Me resonates on the same wavelengths of these legacy stories? And did you plan, or find a place along the way, where you happily deviated, looking to put your mark on this kind of story?
Gailey: This book is very much an homage to The Thing, which is a film that meditates heavily on distrust, isolation, and how frightening it is that we have no way of knowing exactly what is happening inside the people around us. Ultimately I think that particular fear—the fear of the unknowable interiority of others—is an extension of some deep yearning to know and connect with another in a real way.
There is also a lot of connective tissue shared between Spread Me and the movie Alien—which, alongside The Thing, forces the viewer to confront the idea that their loved ones can be permanently transformed by the desire of another creature to invade and consume.
In Spread Me, I tried to look at these two ideas through the lenses of desire and love. To desire something is to be vulnerable to it; to accept, in advance, the possibility of a wound. Love is frightening because it presumes future grief. This book is about the wound, and the grief, and what it’s like when those two things aren’t enough to save us from desire and love.
Martin: Kinsey is such a fascinating protagonist, especially as we learn what turns her on, where she finds pleasure, and as she navigates the horror and attraction of the entity, who has similar feelings for her. What was your hope in exploring Kinsey’s desires?
Gailey: It’s important in this particular narrative that Kinsey is a character who experiences sexual desire—and intense, constant sexual frustration. When she’s pursued by—and finds herself attracted to—the specimen, the experience of that attraction isn’t wholly novel for her. It is, however, contextually novel, because she’s not used to having the object of her desire be accessible and responsive to her.
There’s a sense of safety in wanting something you know you can never have—the desire becomes a fancy that can be indulged without limitation, because there’s no way to ever turn that fancy into action. It’s so frightening then, in turn, to be offered something you know you shouldn’t be able to get your hands on—especially when you’ve never had to practice restraint before.
Martin: How did her character growth influence the rest of the crew, each of whom is so multifaceted and real?
Gailey: The other characters in this book exist not just as foils to Kinsey, but as an intricate web of intimacy to which Kinsey is peripheral. They evolve in relationship to each other. At the start of this book, Kinsey’s lack of entanglement with her team members is a point of safety and stability. But as she grows into her own desire, her distance from her team puts them all in danger.
Martin: It’s no secret that this book is about bodies. The inhabiting of them, the use of them, the meaning behind them, the horrors intrinsic to them before and after a mysterious entity is trying them on like a hermit crab’s new shell. And of course, there’s also the joy of bodies, the pleasure inherent to them, the erotic thrill of bodies touching, self touching self, of attraction and desire and horniness and dread… I’d love to know: when did the focus on bodies come into focus for you? And how did you balance the erotic and the horrifying throughout?
Gailey: Writing erotica and writing horror are, to me, two sides of the same piece of craft. The goal is to invite the reader into their body, either in anticipation of pleasure or in anticipation of suffering. I knew as soon as I started writing that I’d want this book to be focused on physicality, and my goal became to engage the reader in both types of anticipation at once.
Martin: Spread Me is such a good title because it not only conjures images of sexy, intimate wordplay between individuals, but almost states the mystery specimen’s goal upfront. “Go ahead, spread me,” they seem to be saying. How did this title come about?
Gailey: The entity in this book has two goals. One is the conscious goal of intimacy with Kinsey; the other is an unconscious goal, to rapidly reproduce and infect as many hosts as possible. In both senses, it wants Kinsey to approach it as a lover—and the desire is mutual. I thought of the phrase while considering a crucial moment of dialogue in the book, and fell in love with how confrontational and unapologetic it is.
This is not a coy, sweet, shy book. It contains fucking and the fucking is not nice. Spread Me is a title that tells the reader what they’re getting into. It looks the reader in the eye and makes a demand of them immediately.
Martin: And the idea of agency for the entity, did that agency grow or diminish while you were writing this? And did your entity ever surprise you as they went through their journey?
Gailey: There is certainly a place for books about what it’s like to be sexually pursued by something that does not have agency—hell, the first draft of the novel that’s been ruining my life for the past five years involved a woman being seduced by a biome. But I’ve come to realize that I’m not the person to write those stories. As a writer, I am not compelled by the idea of being sexually pursued but not wanted. So, the entity in this book was always going to have agency; it was always going to be genuinely trying to win Kinsey over. It surprised me, though, how much sympathy I ended up feeling for the creature, who is trying their best and struggling so hard.
Martin: Your professional career started in the fantastical with Magic for Liars, alternate history adventures with River of Teeth and Upright Women Wanted, and over the last few years, starting in Echo Wife, then Just Like Home, and now with Spread Me, you’ve been moving more and more into horror as a genre, (though I know there are plenty of moments of horror in your earlier work!). Has this been a conscious move on your part? What have you found satisfying in horror that you can’t find in fantasy/the fantastical, or what is it about that vein of work that has been rewarding for you as a writer?
Gailey: This hasn’t been a conscious move, but I think it’s a sign of growth in my craft. I haven’t really changed what I write about, but I’ve grown in my ability to invite readers into discomfort and trust that they’ll come with me on the journey. Earlier in my career, I was afraid to ask that much of my readers. I would hedge and sew in safety nets and make sure to tend to my readers’ needs, rather than letting them handle themselves. Now, I know they’re capable of so much, and I am more inclined to let us both push our limits together.
Martin: It’s no secret that horror as a genre has been booming recently, especially horror work from writers of marginalized communities and identities. What is it about this genre that makes it such a rich space to explore for writers from these communities and these identities?
Gailey: I had to sit with this question for so long. Something about it felt impossible to answer, in part because the concept of marginalization is so broad and encompasses so many different axes of identity—the idea of trying to identify why marginalization and horror work well together felt like a very “you must first invent the universe” kind of situation. It wasn’t until I really engaged with that frustration—why the fuck can I not answer this seemingly simple question??—that it clicked.
The thing is, marginalization isn’t an identity. It’s a social and cultural reaction to identity. I am marginalized because I am queer; queerness is part of my identity, but marginalization is part of my experience, and it’s not a part of my experience I generated. It’s inflicted on me by others. I don’t get to opt in or out of the status “marginalized.” Horror is so frequently an exploration of this experience: Suffering that someone or something else chooses for you. Marginalized creators across various identities have so many different lenses through which to examine what it’s like to endure that suffering, to survive it, to succumb to it.
Martin: When you began working in the horror space yourself, in this project and others, what about it made you excited to explore the space?
Gailey: This is another stumper for me because I don’t usually think about genre when I set out to work on a project. That said, when horror readers and passionate horror fans started to engage deeply with my work, I felt incredibly honored to have written things that this particular audience found interesting. Horror readers know how to approach work with a sense of curiosity. They’re open to—and often seeking out—new, unexpected experiences. Dedicated horror readers aren’t inclined to recoil from stories that deviate from an anticipated template; they’re comfortable with ambiguity; they are rarely seeking out moralistic, didactic work. I suppose it makes sense, then, that my work—which is rarely, if ever, interested in unambiguous, morally instructive narrative—would find a home in this genre.
Martin: Lastly, when you found your stories, did you find them in conversation with other horror being published, or were you hoping to explore something you hadn’t seen yet?
Gailey: If I say ‘both’, am I a parody of myself? Oh well, on with my little clown nose. It’s both. I would never claim to be able to generate a new idea that’s totally untethered from what came before. Everything I write is in conversation with everything else, and I always want to be adding something new to the conversation. I’m just grateful to have such incredible art to be in conversation with.
