Vampires Are Parasites.
Why Not Make Them Worms?

 Tapeworm is a vampire novel. It says so right on the cover.

But what mental image does that conjure? Often, we think of a gaunt figure silhouetted by a flash of lightning, bending over a victim’s neck, only to recoil from the crucifix and garlic around their neck. Or perhaps it’s a young man twinkling in the Pacific Northwestern sunlight, calling a much younger woman “spider monkey.” Maybe it’s the tortured vampire-with-a-soul haunting the alleys of Los Angeles as a supernatural private eye.

It probably isn’t a writhing mass of parasitic worms in the shape of a Latina biker.

When readers pick up my novel and see ‘a vampire novel’ on the cover, I know what expectations they’ll have. And I’m glad to subvert them.

But… why worms?

the vampire as a suave, aristocratic figure who perpetuates a Eurocentric archetype. Brooding? Check. Male? Check. White? Check. This representation, however, ignores the fact that nearly every culture has its own version of the vampiric creature, many of which predate this Western archetype. In the rural areas of Tlaxcala, Mexico, tales of the tlahuelpuchi are passed from generation to generation. In the Philippines there exists the manananggal, a creature that haunts the Visayan provinces. In western Africa, the obayifo lurks, a witch who possess individuals, compelling them to drain the life from children and crops. Creatures of the night compelled to feed on their community, hiding in plain sight.

Beings that feed off a host while bringing it harm.

Parasites.

Vampiric lore, to me, isn’t unified by the Transylvanian myth and gothic literary scene. It is unified, instead, by the parasitic nature of vampires and how they feed on their hosts.

When I wrote Tapeworm, I wanted to focus on this unifying element. I wasn’t interested in exploring tired tropes but in forging my own vampiric creature. And when given the opportunity, I looked to nature, not just mythology. We live in a world filled with 300,000 different species of parasites, 300 of which can affect humans. From the micropredation of a tick growing fat on our blood to the single-celled protozoa of malaria, we are surrounded by tiny creatures bent on feeding on us, and there’s something brutally insidious about a diminutive organism trying to burrow into me. As terrifying as the attack of a xenomorph is, it is the being dragged back to be used as a host by a face hugger that I find far more horrific. Give me the quick death of forejaws punching through the back of my skull over a chest burster any day.

Vampiric lore, to me, isn’t unified by the Transylvanian myth and gothic literary scene. It is unified, instead, by the parasitic nature of vampires and how they feed on their hosts.

But what I found was most interesting (read: horrifying) was just how many parasites were classified as worms.

So. Many. Worms.

There are literally hundreds of individual species of parasitic worms, broken down into three main groups: roundworms, flukes, and (duh) tapeworms. These creatures—classified as endoparasites—live inside their hosts and can go undetected for years. There is something about a creature living inside us, squirming around our guts, that is particularly repellent to think about. It’s the moments between the face hugger falling off of John Hurt’s face and his ribs exploding outward all over his cereal where everything seems fine and everyone is relieved. How could they know?

I have a task for you. Search what a magnified close-up of a tapeworm looks like in your favorite search engine. Those teeth-like things at the end of it are hooks. That’s how they latch onto of your insides. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction—only in this case I would say truth is more horrible than fiction.

“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.”

It is exactly this—the parasitic nature of vampires and the visceral disgust of intestinal worms digging into your skin—that compelled me to create an endoparasitic creature for Tapeworm. Like any parasite, this thing wants to feed, to reproduce, and to spread. It is patient in its desires. From the first infection in Superstition Valley, California, the no-longer-imprisoned creature has the same motivations of any other vampiric creature around the world. Stay hidden, stay out of the sun, and feed.

So, yes, I stand by the ‘a vampire novel’ on the cover of my debut. Open yourself up to something more inclusive—and more disgusting. My vampiric creature is asking you, “Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

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