Peeps

Peeps is a 2005 young adult science fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld. Taking place in New York, it follows a would-be college freshman Cal Thompson, who contracts a supernatural STI that normally alters human behavior, endowing the infected with strange abilities. People in the diseased state are called “peeps,” short for “parasite positives,” and are hunted by an ancient society called the Night Watch. When Thompson’s infection fails to affect him with all of its usual symptoms, he realizes he is immune. He is recruited by the Night Watch to trawl New York City, preventing the vampiric epidemic from spreading. The novel blends the phenomenon of the sexually transmitted infection, a common anxiety for young adults, with the literary archetypes of the zombie and vampire, to create a modern horror plot.

The novel begins two days after nineteen-year-old Thompson moves from Texas to New York City to start college. At one of his first nights in a New York bar, while his judgment is severely impaired, he is hit on by Morgan, who says she wants to help him lose his virginity. He goes home with her and has his first sexual experience. In the following weeks, he realizes their relationship was merely a one-night stand. Having never even learned her last name, he does his best to forget about her.

In the first few months of school, he carries on as a normal freshman studying biology in the big city, hooking up with multiple girls, to whom he unknowingly transmits his infection. A symptom of his infection is that he wants to have sex nearly every hour of the day, causing him to propagate the disease to people who are not immune. Thompson is confused when every girl he tries to date seems to quickly become crazy, hostile, and bloodthirsty.



Thompson eventually realizes that he has an STI that is not normal. The Night Watch takes notice of him, educating him about the usual symptoms of the disease, which include a kind of dementia, cannibalism, night vision, and superhuman vision, strength, and speed. They explain that this disease is what is historically known in cult fiction and other genres of literature as vampirism. He gains the beneficial superpowers of a “vampire,” but has none of the destructive symptoms other than a constant sexual hunger. For example, true peeps fear sunlight and have a craving for blood. Since before America was founded, the Night Watch has fought against the scourge of peeps.

After the Night Watch charges Thompson with his first task of locating all of the girls he has infected, he rehabilitates each girl he has kissed in the past year, including his ex-girlfriend. When he is done, he is unsatisfied with his accomplishment, knowing that there are more in the world. To keep him busy, the Night Watch tells him to capture Morgan, the girl who initially infected him. As Thompson tries to find her, assisted by his partner, Lacey, he is forced to recall his hazy memories of the first night at the bar. He remembers only a drink called the Bahamalama-Dingdong, and luckily runs into a handbill advertising the drink.

After finding Morgan by looking through the phone book and finding an address under her name near the bar where they met, Thompson learns that she has been intentionally infecting people, although for a reason he never expected. A new, evolved strain of the peep virus has emerged, and Morgan was one of the first people to become aware of it. Its symptoms make its victims less susceptible to what the Night Watch calls “anathema,” or the fear and hatred of what one used to love. People who contract the new form of the virus function normally and surreptitiously spread their disease. Morgan has been trying to counteract this new, more dangerous form of the virus by reintroducing the old strain to compete.



Morgan demonstrates that this evolved virus has been propagated mainly by New York City’s population of cats: peep cats, which are the true vehicles of infection, preying on the unsuspecting human population. Using this knowledge, Thompson discovers that the cats exchange the parasites with humans via their air passages during seemingly innocuous cuddling sessions. Thompson suspects that his own cat, Cornelius, has the peep virus, due to his red eyes. Realizing that Cornelius probably infected Lace the one time she slept over, he rushes to her and tries to give her a warning. She accepts her fate, knowing that if she keeps taking medication to stave off the symptoms, she can finally be in a normal relationship with Thompson.

At the novel’s conclusion, Thompson and Lace go to a darkened train station to test Lace’s peep abilities. There, they are attacked by a huge earthworm carrying the virus, suggesting that the epidemiology goes much deeper than they ever imagined. Peeps describes a complex epidemiology underlying the strange, vampiric STI that predates medical science and thus is up to its young protagonists to squelch.