We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Tapeworm by A.P. Thayer, a body-horror vampire novel publishing with Evil Twin on August 18th. We’re thrilled to also include an excerpt from the audiobook edition of Tapeworm, read by Lee Osorio. Click here to jump straight to the audio excerpt!
After the recent separation from his wife Trish, Victor hopes his friends’ annual weekend retreat to the Californian desert town of Superstition will loosen him up and reforge the group’s fraying bonds. But something is waiting underneath Superstition, crawling its way into their group, and feeding into their desires.
Victor knows too well what it means to repress his desires. He’s always attempted to be the perfect partner, yet often found himself lacking. With Trish skipping the trip, he begins falling into the wild underbelly of Superstition in new ways. When the leader of the town’s Welcoming Committee approaches him with a romantic, sexually charged offer, Victor wonders if it’s too good to be true.
But the Welcoming Committee expects a price to be paid for its services. One that cannot be fulfilled by willing bodies alone. By the end of the weekend, group bonding will have developed a whole new meaning.
Because something is hungry for Victor and his friends.
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Tapeworm
Prologue
The earthquake that shakes Superstition Valley is uncharacteristic, not because quakes are rare there but because of the aftershocks that plague the valley for so long afterward. As the region eventually returns to baseline seismic activity, one final echo reverberates deep beneath the ground. One final rumble, and then the earth shifts and cracks. From this wound, It oozes, a formless mist of yellow, awakened to a new world and new sensations. A prisoner no more. Alive once again.
As it shakes off the millennia of sleep, it delights in the sensory input of this new world. Temperature and the passage of time. Thoughts and emotions.
Pain.
That of others as well as the pain of its own hunger.
The land was dead and desolate when it had been bound. Not a single plant grew in that desert basin. No life called it home. It was little more than a forgotten corner of the world in which to be exiled.
Not so anymore.
Hungrily, it stretches toward the sandy surface with its twisting cacti and blooming wildflowers, a basin surrounded by mountains crowned with jagged peaks. Above, the fiery orb of the sun, its ancestral enemy, burns bright, harsh, and deadly. The creature will have to wait until the sun sinks below the horizon and the valley falls into shadow. Only then can it truly be free.
Near the center of the desert basin, a victim—human, female, flesh—slams a sliding glass door. The shockwave rolls over the creature’s body, through its near-interminable coil of muscled segments that writhe beneath the surface, flexing, contorting, and growing. It births tendrils that stretch out through the packed clay and loose sand, inching toward the woman. She has deep brown hair that shines in the dying light of day. A breeze rolls across the valley and pulls loose strands free, whipping them behind her in a way that makes the creature salivate. The woman’s emotions are a heady mixture, too. Complex—tainted by grief and weighed down by longing. The creature recognizes an echo of its own centuries-old anger within the woman’s pain and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped. Her maelstrom of emotional carnage is a vessel to inhabit. A new home, even, perhaps.
Sadness, frustration, a life lost. Lives. Understanding continues to grow within the creature beneath the sands, understanding of the woman as well as the world to which it has awakened. Voices are coming from inside the house as others prepare to depart. They have just spent a long weekend together. There is embarrassment, feigned joy, and annoyance pulsing off them. There is a gulf between her and them that is growing wider with every beat of her heart. Something within her is calling out to be rescued.
“Fuck,” she whispers, and the creature wriggles a little closer, as if that one word is an invitation. A hundred feet below, the creature’s ancient young finally wake and pour from the cracks in their prisons, awakened by their mother’s return. The remains of the creature’s prison—the vast underground lake, the unending cavern, the impenetrable darkness—fill with the old young. The wardens, ageless hummingbirds, flitter about, dive-bombing the water to feast on the squirming young, preventing their escape. There is no way out for the spawn, though. Not that way.
But their sacrifices are only a distraction.
The creature, in the meantime, extends itself farther through the new crack. The hummingbirds do not hear the creature’s escape. They are unaware of its new freedom, too busy destroying generation after generation of young.
No matter. There will be more.
The door slides open again, and another human—male, mate, prey—steps into the late autumn chill of the valley. The wind is picking up, and what heat the sand collected during the day leaks away like blood from a wound.
“Trish.”
The man’s voice is strained. Half annoyance, half exhaustion. He has a duffel bag gripped in his hand, the cloth twisted in his fist like it’s the only thing keeping him from losing control. The woman, Trish, ignores him. Her eyes are shining and unfocused, her lips pursed and trembling. Her heart hammers within her chest, pumping hot, sweet blood through her veins.
The creature groans out in hunger. It has not eaten in so, so long.
He sits down next to her and stares into the desert, too. Their relationship is a bloated dead thing, waterlogged and expanding with gas as they struggle to keep it ambulatory, even as the flesh sloughs away. Flies swarm thickly on the putrid cadaver, eager to glut themselves on the sweet rot of what could have been and what might have been. An exquisite corpse, swollen with maggots. A mound of decayed hope and necrotized dreams.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says finally. A lie. He did.
“It’s fine,” she responds, and it isn’t, but that’s okay. They have both made up their minds about the other but are too cowardly to do anything about it. Instead, they gather with friends in attempts to recapture the youth they once had. The yearly vacation is over, though, and the charade didn’t even last the weekend.
He slides his hand into hers, but there’s a lifelessness in their touch that has become them. He squeezes, and she shudders. Involuntary revulsion. Anger flares in him, and he lets go. Neither of them is in control anymore.
The sun sets lower. The day has grown long, now. The shadows of the distant peaks have almost reached them, jagged peaks crawling across the sandy floor, history’s slowest charge.
The creature stretches out and…
Its flesh sears in the light of the sun, and it recoils into the safety of the ground. Too soon, too soon! It must be patient. Patient. What is a few more moments after so many millennia?
“Let’s go home.” Beneath the anger and barely contained judgment, there is a hint of an apology that will never come. It is too choked with the oily residue of his ego. “We’re tired. We don’t drink this much anymore.” Excuses. Lies. The creature savors the falsehoods.
Trish scoffs at the “we.” He swallows. A sore subject, but what isn’t these days? They sit in silence, unwilling to retread that particular argument, unwilling to move forward. Time dribbles past.
Almost there…
The shadows finally reach her bare feet, and the creature’s corpse-white tendril darts out, stabbing beneath the cuticle of her pinky toe, hungry for the warmth of her flesh, where it pulls itself beneath her skin with hooked barbs.
She gasps. “Something bit me.”
He sighs and lifts her foot, his treatment roughened by exhaustion and irritation. Like this is one more thing to deal with. There is a delightful hole in his being where patience and empathy once lived. A burrow in which to nest, if only the creature can get to him, too.
“I don’t see anything,” he sniffs, confirming his own hypothesis. He can never be wrong.
She rises to the bait. An explosion of anger, like the heat of a furnace when the door is pulled open.
“Am I being dramatic again?” Her venom splatters all over his front. He recoils. She pulls her foot away and curls her toe to inspect her nail. There’s no mark. The creature didn’t leave a trace, after all. It salivates inside her, instead, and feeds on the anger just as it feeds on her.
The male—his name is Vic—takes a deep breath to calm himself. He knows they still must drive home together. They still must live together. He thinks if he keeps everything civil, they can each go to their separate corners of the apartment, leave each other alone, and the relationship can stumble on.
She catches a ripple of movement beneath her skin. The creature makes her forget. It leaks excretions into her bloodstream, spiking her cortisol and adrenaline, pumping her full of norepinephrine. It stokes the furnace of her anger and doesn’t let her move on.
Go on.
“Answer me,” she hisses, less in control of herself than usual.
“Can we not?” He asks, his voice quiet and controlled. He relishes her loss of control. “You used—”
“Used to what?” she snarls.
He swallows the vicious response gurgling up the back of his throat, then speaks with deliberate pauses between the words as if speaking to a child. He thinks he is winning, so he pulls his punch.
“Used to be sweeter.”
“I used to be happy, too,” she spits back at him, even though what she’s really thinking is We used to love each other.
“Oh, whatever,” he snaps, losing his fragile control like he lost it earlier in the weekend. This outburst hurts her less. The creature oozes free from her ear canal and stretches toward him, eager to taste him, too.
Vic moves away. “Come on, we have to go.”
The creature burrows back into her skull, where it drips honeyed poison into her prefrontal cortex.
“I wish I still wanted to touch you,” she says, whispering, and the creature forces her to smile while she says it.
His shame and anger flare white hot, but he does what he so often does. Retreats. He pushes away from her and bites his tongue. Represses and seethes. Bottles it up. When he’s a few steps away, he stops, almost brave enough to give voice to his true feelings.
“Get your shit together,” he says instead. “I don’t want to be stuck in traffic.”
He slams the sliding glass door hard. The creature shivers at the vibration, and therefore so does Trish. Tears form, but they are of anger more than grief. There are two kinds of pain within her. The pain of loss and the pain of rejection. Two sides of the same coin—ego. Her aching fights against the misery that is their life, their apartment, their friends… All the things that have knotted them together, impossible to separate.
The creature floats around inside of her, indolent in its consumption, and slips behind her retinas. It sees their relationship play out linearly, as humans experience time. Bathes in the way they used to love each other, warms itself with the memory of their fiery need, now long dead. Altered states, flashing lights, loud music. The details have changed since its imprisonment, but the celebrations taste the same. It floats in the happy future Trish imagined for them when they first met. Vic was her salvation from a life of pain and solitude.
That fantasy has almost fully slipped away, so the creature latches on, hooks into the dream, and drags it to the forefront of her mind. It forces her to relive those memories over and over and over. Makes her experience them as both the subject and the observer. It overwhelms her passivity. It drowns her denial. It suffocates her acceptance. Makes her remember without the frenetic energy of a cocktail of drugs and the haze of alcohol.
Then it impregnates her fantasies with new possibilities. A lifetime together, as they once were. Joy. Love. Desire… All the things she once had. All the things she could have again.
Do you want this?
She hiccups. She misses who she was then. She misses who she thought they were going to be. She feels lost now. She was happy and can be once again. Right?
Of course.
On the other side of the house, the friend group is loading their vehicles. Their voices are carried by the cutting wind. Another weekend ritual finished, and another failed attempt at recapturing what used to be. Another step closer to the grave, but to her, they’re already dead.
They can truly live, too.
Her eyes are unfocused, and tears have streaked her foundation. They plummet to the ground, lost in the growing shadows.
Vic drags Trish’s large suitcase from their room, past the sliding glass door, and down the front hall.
This time, there is no need for the creature to manipulate. Trish remembers Vic as he was back then. Fun. Happy. Playful. She remembers the passion with which he loved her. The strength with which he fucked her. Anger and pain flare within her again as she remembers the sorry state of their marriage. Purple twilight settles over the landscape, casting the world into the purgatory between night and day. Like the purgatory she has been living in.
I can make it better.
She takes a sobbing breath and straightens, her head falling backward, her face up to the darkening sky, and she screams her frustration to the first glimmering stars. Her friends are saying goodbye in the foyer, ready to drive back to Los Angeles. They pretend not to hear her.
“Yes,” she answers, as the echoes of her fury fade away.
The creature has her now. Its voice is sickly sweet, cocooning her in promises while tendrils of itself spread and spread, taking over every part of her, settling into the new body while it waits for what will come next.
A hummingbird hovers nearby, tasting the air, sensing something is wrong. The creature sends one impulse, and she moves like a snake, snatching the bird’s tiny body from the air and squeezing.
She takes a ragged breath and brushes away her tears, already looking forward to next year’s trip. She does not notice herself wiping the crushed bird’s body onto the desert floor.
“Everything will be better.”
Listen to the audio excerpt:
Excerpted from Tapeworm, copyright © 2026 by A.P. Thayer.
