Flesh by Richard Laymon

Flesh
by Richard Laymon
1987 WH Allen

An eel or something crawls into people's backs and turns them into bloodthirsty killers.  A thin pretext for a string of killings, but mainly the book is about a college student constantly breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend.

Actually, since this is Richard Laymon, most of the book is people taking showers and deciding what clothes to wear.  I barely managed to make it through this one, and only by skimming through pages upon pages of showers and picking out socks.

We have a Sheriff's deputy who instantly accepts the premise of a kill-spree inducing parasite when he isn't killing pages in an irrelevant child custody subplot.  The college student has her roommates get killed off by a possessed horror nerd loser (little close to the bone there, Laymon) while she agonizes over whether her horny boyfriend is only interested in sex.

The killings seemed a bit sparse and tame for a Laymon book.  I really need to start at the beginning with Laymon and work my way up - the hefty page counts starting in the late 80s didn't do him any favors.