We Spread by Iain Reid Review

Elderly widow Penny has a fall in her flat and ends up in a care home. But it’s an unusual place - just four residents and two care workers. Is the manager taking blood samples from the residents without their consent? Why can’t they go outside? Time seems to pass differently here and Penny begins to suspect that bad things are going on in the dark areas of the care home…

I’m not sure I totally understood Iain Reid’s novel We Spread - I think it’s about how dementia can make it seem like you’re living in a horror story - but I know I enjoyed it for the most part. It’s well-written and moves surprisingly quickly considering the static nature of the action and characters. Although, Reid left me wanting at the end after so much interesting buildup which felt like the novel gave a lotta sizzle and not much steak.

Reid is able to evoke an increasingly sinister, horror-esque story through mundane, everyday things in a really cleverly subtle way. We experience the story from Penny’s point of view and consequently question the same things she does: the knocking on the wall of the adjacent flat which is empty; the man who claims to be a handyman who enters her flat - she doesn’t check his ID nor sees what he does exactly; random strangers she thinks are staring at her from across the street; the haunting messages she leaves herself in her clothes; all of which could be interpreted as underhand, even supernatural, things… or signs of a deteriorating mind.

I’m fairly certain the explanation for all of it is simply that: namely, that Penny is in her 90s and, as will likely happen to most of us to make it to that age, is losing her marbles a bit. She has good days, she has bad, but there’s nothing that suspicious going on - she’s just not as mentally sharp as she was when she was younger, which makes her an unreliable narrator.

Which is why I found the final act a bit anticlimactic. Throughout the story, Reid hints at something nefarious going on in the care home. It IS weird that there’s only four residents and two carers - that’s not a normal setup. Then we’re introduced to the manager, Shelley, who isn’t as extreme a figure as Nurse Ratched but she’s presented as being in that vein and her behaviour, if accurate, is questionable - it’s suggested that she’s conducting weird experiments in the home. At one point Jack, the other carer, says and does some strange things, which could be viewed in more than one way but feels like Reid is making us see the care home as something other than what it is.

There are references to Pando trees - “pando” in Latin means “I spread”, almost like the title - there are branches on the book’s cover, and Penny often looks through the windows at the trees beyond. The care home is called Six Cedars and there are six people in the home. I’ve probably read too many bad horror stories but I felt like all of that was Reid hinting that Shelley was turning its residents into trees or something nutty! I don’t know what all the tree stuff was about though - maybe they’re metaphors for people who used to be around or the “we” in the title is life itself spreading?

I liked that the story celebrated mortality - death frightens all of us so you rarely see the end of life portrayed in a positive light, but life has meaning because it’s limited and one day it ends for all of us. The real horror is in living forever, not least because it would make existence truly meaningless. Maybe that’s why Penny grew to resent Shelley so much - Shelley, like all care home managers, is tasked with keeping its residents alive, encouraging them to continue working on their projects to keep their minds active, while Penny really just wanted to die.

I can understand why Reid kept adding tantalising details to the story - to make the narrative more interesting rather than staid - but it also made you think there would be a more satisfying payoff than the one presented, which made the one we did get feel underwhelming in the lack of answers it provided.

As interesting a storyteller as Iain Reid is, there’s something lacking in his novels to make them memorable. He doesn’t lean towards the melodramatic, which is also what I like about his work, but it does make for some mundane stories overall. We Spread may not have delivered as much as I wanted but I still think it’s a decent book - a weak ending never ruins a novel if the journey towards it was enjoyable, and that was certainly the case here. If you enjoy understated horror similar to Shirley Jackson’s stories, We Spread is definitely worth checking out.