Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

Wednesday I finished the book Spread Me by Sarah Gailey. The recommendation came via one of those best horror of the year / 2025 lists that are cropping up at the moment. There are a bunch of reviews on Storygraph that sum it up as succinctly as I would...what would The Thing (you know, the Carpenter movie with the shape changing monster) be like if instead of the arctic (a cold desert) it was set in a traditional (sand) desert, and what if the lead researcher was absolutely horny for the monster and vice versa. That will get you 95% of the way there. It’s a bit all in on the sex (what would The Thing do if it had enough presence of mind to seduce its victims with it’s ability to mimic body parts?) and the sense of nihilism driven by researching full-on climate change/impact while isolated with a bunch of scientists/doctors who have somewhat given up and are thinking about just staying there until someone forces them to leave and coupling their research with….coupling...and copious alcohol.

It’s an enjoyable read. Gailey is a good writer. And if you aren’t someone who gets hung up on sex and weird sex at that, Gailey is saying something interesting about partners who go all in trying to change and be what you want, almost to the point of creepiness and turning you off, when all along what you wanted was what was original about them and drew you to them in the first place.

Book Club 1 - Witch King by Martha Wells

Jessica started a book group and our first read - roughly quarterly at the moment given we're all doing other things and reading other things - is Martha Wells' Witch King [Rising World Book 1, although there's no book 2 yet and it's pretty self contained].  Thought I'd capture some thoughts/notes so they lock in a little before we meet in a few weeks.

I liked it. Although it's a tough start because of the complexity of her world.  Reminded me a bit of my experience at 18 reading Dune on the hillside overlooking Troy, NY, at RPI. Took me a while to get past feeling like I was reading a history and understand where the story was.

I don't know that I'd read book 2 if it ever comes out, but as a standalone it was interesting.  It's in the same vein as a lot of fantasy world-building lit I read lately, like Sanderson's Stormlit series, which I took a break from after book 2 to read this, each of those being 1000+ pages.  It's an interesting comparison to Sanderson's Stormlit [so far] because in his books, the main character gets an overview of the world via the storm spren and finds that humans [and otherwise] everywhere are endemically and always at war.  Maybe that changes by page 5000, but in the first 2000 pages it's a brutal world. In Martha Wells' world people across cultures are trying to find common ground and rebuild.  The world before the baddies show up to settle/colonize and use them as resources is one where there isn't much war, just negotiated skirmishes.  And the world after throwing off the colonizers is one of  [almost] everyone working together to make a better world, although the warning that one always has to be on guard lest things backslide, potentially in a similar but different from, and particularly from those who learned from the colonizers or [unfortunately] admired things about them, is a strong thread.

And that colonizers thread....VERY Babel [RF Kuang].  I think the parallels are tight, although Babel is during colonization and trying to get to a post colonial world and how to balance the good and the bad, and Witch King is about a post-colonial world that's been decimated and is on edge because much like Lord of the Rings, the baddies aren't necessarily gone. That looming threat of re/colonization is something I suspect is very real for a large part of the world.

The idea of the power wells is interesting in Witch King.  They're powered by various things. One even seems to be powered by a people's own belief in their innate superiority [definitely a statement there].  But the most important is the colonizers' ability to create magic powered by pain.  That means in the context of colonizing everyone is a resource.  Except for Kai, the main character, who by taking on the mantle of that power [and eventually giving it up, which is probably the primary 'lesson'], powers it by his own pain instead of the pain of others.  Erik said the 'flip' of what's expected is a big part of the book.  I don't think that's true.  The parallels to Nazi sympathizers  / accommodators that seem angelic...no one is fooled.  Ever.  They don't trust them even after the fall of the colonizers. People with power aren't necessarily to be trusted. Those who walk in each others' shoes, including literally, are. And the assertion that colonizing is powered by the pain of others, and the way past it is to use your own pain within the context of their own structures to break those structures....that seems extremely straight forward.  I think it's also fairly consistent through most of the book that the way to thrive is to create family where you can and that finding that family in unlikely places by breaking old hatreds creates something better.  I compared it to the Fast and Furious series for Erik, which I don't think he can relate to and which is a bit of joke...but Dom always claims the only thing that matters is family, and his family is made by accumulation of former enemies, real family, friends, and more.  I don't think Martha Wells would be keen to hear, "Hey, you wrote the fantasy version of Fast and Furious with power wells instead of cars and Kai instead of Dom", but I don't think it's an unreasonable comparison.

There's a bit of a D and D aspect in the various characters and their skills.  The ability to repurpose a spell to make people choke on flowers comes to mind.  Or the fiddling with magic to get unexpected results to get out of a bad situation, like the flooding.  Or the one character who sort of knits everything together while the other characters run a little slipshod at personal goals.  But I'd posit that it's a very interesting juxtaposition to show characters in what seems like a traditional met-by-accident D and D party with complementary skills to solve a problem, but realize that they're much more than that to each other.  The characters are constructed family regardless of origin, mistakes, family of origin [or culture], past.  Where in another book you might wonder "why did that character do that thing for that other character" and you expect the logical shoe to drop, in Witch King it's because they're family.  It's something they'd do for their own family, so they do it for their constructed family.  The other shoe never drops.

So Kai leverages so much of what he's learned to ensure the future - in terms of big politics for the Rising World - looks like the families he's had and constructed.  And lost. 

Bus Ride

Below is a picture of me reading short horror stories during the express bus ride into Minneapolis in the morning.  It still hasn't been the coldest I expect.  I'm not looking forward to that.  But the average ride is about half an hour one way if I don't screw around.  A little longer if I walk to the stop and walk home from the park and ride.


That's how I started my day.  I finished my day by getting ill by having an allergic reaction to prepackaged fish.  I don't known when they changed their ingredients, but my wife says the fish tastes different with the new packaging, and I agree; so we both suspect they did.  This is the second time I've had a reaction to the tilapia, so I'm pretty sure that's what's causing it.  The reaction follows a pretty consistent pattern: 1.) sleepy and back hurts (diaphragm spasming), 2.) stomach problems, lots of belching, probably precipitated by the spasms, 3.) ride my bike or exercise to try and blow through the worst of it unless my back hurts to much from the spasms or I belch so much I can't really breath, 4.) feel like I have to take a big dump, not because of the food allergy and my bowels, but because of the spasms.  It's what I traditionally get from fresh tomatoes and certain casks (particularly rum) as well.  The fish nonsense is completely new.  Maybe I'll slowly become allergic to a few new things a year until I'm sitting around eating nothing but ice cubes.

Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations is an excellent read.  The gist of the book is that hallucinations are much more common than reported or suspected and that people have them for all sorts of reasons including migraines, inadvertent drug use, purposeful drug use,  Parkinson's, sleep, epilepsy, old age, death.  And in all manners: images of self, images of others, smells, landscapes, shapes, sounds.  Sacks feels that what these hallucinations reveal about the structure of the brain is important and shows that our minds have specialized structures to handle facial recognition, pattern recognition, language, and more.  That might seem obvious, but hallucinations gave an insight into the way the brain handles these constructs even pre-MRI.  There's a spot in the book which I can't find where he posits that our brains may be doing something a computer does not which is taking all the various data it receives and running semi-random/semi-structured loops constantly, restructuring what it has available to make up new information.  Sacks goes so far as to say the brain may just be playing.  That's a fascinating idea for AI, that a sentient machine might need ongoing loops of background noise in order to make sense of the world.

As with other Sacks books, he offers examples at every turn.  For me, a few of them hit close to home from around my accident.  I'm glad I wasn't in a coma for five weeks and out of action for seven months.  But the intubation/drugs/lights combo sounds about right:

"Robert Hughes, in the opening of his book on Goya, writes about a prolonged delirium during his recovery from a nearly fatal car crash.  He was in a coma for five weeks and hospitalized for almost seven months.  In intensive care he wrote, 'One's consciousness...is strangely affected by the drugs, the intubation, the fierce and continuous lights, and one's own immobility.  These give rise to prolonged narrative dreams, or hallucinations, or nightmares.'" [p. 186].

And this sounds almost exactly like the visions I had when I closed my eyes - the ones where I used Stripe the Pillowpet zebra to slowly get rid of them (although it may have been time at work).  In particular, look for "German" on my post about visions.  Ties nicely to his example of Anne closing her eyes and seeing Chinese movies.

"Then came a more radical change.  Anne found herself in the back of "a 1950s Chinese bus on a propaganda tour of Chinese Christian churches."   She recalls watching a movie on religious freedom in China projected onto the rear window of the bus.  But the viewpoint kept changing--both the movie and the bus suddenly tilted to odd angles, and it was unclear, at one point, whether a church spire she saw was "real," outside the bus, or part of the movie.  Her strange journey occupied the greater part of a feverish and insomniac night.  // Anne's hallucinations appear only when she closed her eyes and would vanish as soon as she opened them." [ p. 190-91].

Finally - this has nothing to do with my accident.  I'm just highly amused that someone has hallucinations where the end result should be screaming THAT'S NUMBERWANG!

Regarding sleep paralysis and a woman named Christina: "He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-ONE-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically...." [p. 234]

Ishmael

Ishmael has been covered ad infinitum elsewhere.  Wikipedia will give you a Cliff's Notes style version of the Takers and the Leavers and how man isn't as outside of nature as s/he s/he thinks s/he is (well...that's why we don't use that style often - it would mess with HTML parsing).  While I don't think Quinn's book is particularly sophisticated or written particularly well, he raises a lot of interesting ideas and I'm glad one of my Facebook friends recommended I read the novel (thanks Kristi!).

What made it more interesting to me is that I've been reading Margaret Atwood's series: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam.  Many parts of it, including the religion of the Gardeners covered extensively in The Year of the Flood, read like aspects of Ishmael's philosophy.  At one point it's noted that the Crakers, who can eat leaves and poop nutrient-rich leavings like a rabbit, have had agriculture bred out of them.  There's no shortage of discussion in Ishmael about how agriculture is a huge burden on humans, at least the form we practice that requires increasing food to provide for increasing population which can provide increasing food...at the cost of a life more attuned to what's easy and maintainable and operates within the normal dictates of nature.  The entanglement of food and reproduction: both genetically restructured in the Crakers.  I could see hints of the philosophy in PZ Myers The Happy Atheist as well.  But it seems like atheism (atheism as related by a biologist) and a book arguing humanity is not the center of creation should align.

My favorite quote from Ishmael was on page 214, "You can't just stop being in a story, you gave to have another story to be in."  An excellent way to phrase the idea that you should always be trying to tell the story you believe you're in, at least to yourself.  Because if you're not telling it, it's still there and others are telling it.

The Long War

I finished The Long War, the sequel to The Long Earth by Baxter and Pratchett.  I really enjoyed the idea behind the first book, but I wasn't as impressed with this book in the series.  In many ways, it felt sort of haphazard, like they were trying to figure out how to get to the next book, but just didn't know how to get there or who to follow.  It was like they didn't know who the focus of the next book would be about.  Spoiler: I'm not even quite sure why they Luke Skywalkered the main character.  It didn't make much sense at all.

Eryn really wants to read the sequel, particularly as she did a book project on the first one last year by writing a follow up chapter.  But I'm worried she's going to be bored as nothing really gets going until around page 200, and then it just sort of wanders around.  They'd have been better served by picking one or two characters to follow more tightly rather than forcing the inclusion of characters that seemed unmotivated and just going through the motions.

50,000

My story is at 50,000 words.  I refuse to admit most of the time, even to myself, how far off my accident threw me from day-to day-writing.  If I had to confess that something in my head had changed, it would be my focus on reading and writing.  Now, it could certainly be that I'm just getting older and my brain is changing anyway.  I'd prefer to believe that.  It's a more comforting thought than that some stupid bump did something I can't introspectively diagnose.

Be that as it may, I hit 50,000 words today or 200 pages if you use the somewhat standard 250 words per page metric. Amusingly, if you count text in review notes, the thing is probably a tenth longer.  I have over 250 notes to myself in the margins.  That doesn't quite make it a novel.  64,000 is the median word count for a novel.  Brave New World falls pretty much right on that line if you're looking for a reference point.  And my goal is 64000-80000 words, so I have 56 to 120 pages left to write.  I think those 56 will come easy as I flush out my ending, and 120 might not even be that hard as I make a last loop through to clean it all up and eliminate my personal habits that creep into the text.  e.g. I tend to run on my sentences, so they need to be broken up in places.  I should watch for that and which and further and farther.  And most important, I have to trawl the text for just, even, about, as far as, no doubt, in that case, and perhaps.  Stupid meta language that weakens the story.

And then the question is what to do with it.  Self publish?  I have friends that are self published.  So that might be the way to go.  I'll leap that hurdle when I cross the 64K line.

Light Reading

I've been getting threatening letters from work to return my overdue book.  Here's proof I'm returning it.  It was in the back of the Mustang when it was totaled, and I took the trouble to respond using my iPhone from my basement prison that I'd return it when I came back to work.  When I did come back, they'd completely shut down the library for remodeling for a few months.  After that I had to find it again.  I've still never read it.