Repressed desires have a nasty habit of finding their way back to the surface – and in A.P. Thayer’s Tapeworm, they return ravenous and fully fanged.
Out now, the novel turns desire, identity and repression into fertile ground for body horror, as a weekend away in the Californian desert turns into a confrontation with something so much more sinister than old friendships beginning to fray.
Perfect for fans of Stephen Graham Jones, V. Castro and Rachel Harrison, and sitting somewhere between films like From Dusk Till Dawn and The Thing, Tapeworm – which launches as the debut release from the newly created Evil Twin banner – takes the familiar vampire narrative somewhere decidedly more intimate and unsettling. The novel places questions of ageing, sexuality and identity at the centre of an increasingly nightmarish weekend, while using its monstrous premise to ask what might happen when people finally stop repressing the parts of themselves they’ve spent years trying to contain.
The novel centers around Victor, recently separated from his wife Trish, as he heads to the desert town of Superstition for his friends’ annual retreat. Hoping the trip will help him loosen up and patch up the group’s fragile bonds, Victor instead finds himself drawn into the town’s strange underbelly. When the leader of its Welcoming Committee makes him a seductive, sexually charged proposition, Victor is suddenly given the chance to explore desires he’s spent years keeping firmly under wraps. The catch? The Committee wants something far more sinister in return.
To celebrate the novel’s release, CinemaChords’ Howard Gorman sat down with A.P. Thayer to talk about giving vampire fiction a gruesome body-horror makeover, the influence of everything from the aforementioned From Dusk Till Dawn to The Thing, and why horror can be such an effective vehicle for dissecting themes of identity, ageing, desire and all those expectations we spend our lives trying to escape.
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