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.

Thompson eventually realizes that he has an STI that is not normal. Thompson is confused when every girl he tries to date seems to quickly become crazy, hostile, and bloodthirsty. 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. 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. Having never even learned her last name, he does his best to forget about her. In the following weeks, he realizes their relationship was merely a one-night stand. He goes home with her and has his first sexual experience. 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. The novel begins two days after nineteen-year-old Thompson moves from Texas to New York City to start college. 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. He is recruited by the Night Watch to trawl New York City, preventing the vampiric epidemic from spreading. When Thompson’s infection fails to affect him with all of its usual symptoms, he realizes he is immune. People in the diseased state are called “peeps,” short for “parasite positives,” and are hunted by an ancient society called the Night Watch. 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.

Peeps is a 2005 young adult science fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld.

Peeps by scott westerfeld