The acclaimed author of the “disorienting, creepy, paranoia-inducing” (Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World) A History of Fear returns with a spine-tingling new thriller about a weight loss treatment with potentially murderous side effects.
Retail worker Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mold of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. Over three hundred pounds, he carries the weight of his childhood trauma and millennial ennui around his waist and in his soul. After trying every diet under the sun, he remains stuck—in his dead-end job, in love, and in his body.
Desperate for help, he enrolls in a clinical trial for a new weight loss product called Obexity. The treatment is as horrifying as the results are miraculous and as Emmett sheds pounds at superhuman speed, every part of his life improves overnight.
Unfortunately, Obexity comes with some killer side effects, including lost stretches of time and overwhelming cravings. Worse, people who were cruel to him have started disappearing and when the police warn of a cannibalistic killer on the loose, he fears that Obexity is turning him into a monster. But how can he give it up now that people are finally starting to treat him like he’s human?
Nerve-racking, sinister, and at times surreal, Nothing Tastes as Good is an unputdownable thriller that combines The Substance with the best of Stephen King and keeps you guessing until the final page.
Release date:
March 31, 2026
Publisher:
Atria Books
Print pages:
320
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Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 Emmett’s heart thudded as he stood before the vending machine, scanning the rows of chips and chocolate held captive behind their black metal rings. Come on, come on, just pick something, he thought. The break room was empty, but it wouldn’t stay that way long. He had only moments, seconds maybe, before someone came in and caught him at it, before the warm flush of comfort he’d been craving all morning was dampened by the cold deluge of shame that came with being caught.
Hearing footsteps down the hall, he panicked and punched in the code for a bag of baked chips, the least satisfying of all possible choices.
Fuck.
As the ring swirled, pushing his selection to the edge of the shelf, Emmett could no longer avoid his reflection in the glass. In the mirror at home he almost passed for unremarkable, but set against the backdrop of the outside world, there was no getting around it—around him. His five-foot-eleven frame; his hair, neon pink fading to ash brown, framing the exaggerated circularity of his face; the bulging chest beneath his scarlet parachute of a tee.
Emmett Truesdale had never been bigger, but in some ways he hadn’t changed at all. Even at the age of five or six, growing up on the northern fringes of his Southern California community, he’d daydreamed of taking a knife and shearing the fat off his body. He’d fantasized about being impaled with tubes and having the excess sucked out of him, being pricked with needles and drained like a blister. His sides had been a particular heartache, the way the flesh, bypassing his relatively flat stomach, collected like meaty saddlebags beside and behind him. His chest too—his “boobs” as his brother called them, before his hand darted out to squeeze and twist.
Imaginative Emmett had sat for hours on the toilet, Mickey Mouse undies looped around his ankles, awash in the fantasy of a procedure, medicine, or enchantment that would allow him to absorb the fat back into his digestive tract and purge it into the bowl with a plop. Never once had he blown out his birthday candles or glimpsed a star arcing across the night sky without wringing the words through his mind: I wish I was thin.
“Hey.” His coworker Jazz came in, burgundy polo snug against her slender frame, with a Frappuccino and half a dozen paper Starbucks sleeves. “Got muffins. They were getting rid of them.” She dumped them onto the table as she sat, not even taking one for herself.
Emmett reached down for his chips, his stomach screaming. “I’m good.”
He could barely keep his eyes off the muffins as he returned to the table. But now that he had company, he was glad he’d chosen something with a sheen of healthfulness.
Jazz had taken the good side of the table, the side closest to and facing the wall, so Emmett grabbed a seat on the opposite side. He flattened his shirt over his butt crack before he sat, ensuring it wouldn’t show through the gap in the back of the chair.
It was among the greatest frustrations of Emmett’s body that clothes didn’t fit it. Most stores didn’t even carry his size now that he was a 4XL, but even made-to-measure garments rejected his physique. In his twenty-eight years he had yet to meet a tailor who could jury-rig a pant to stay up on his so-called waist, the downward slide of flesh formed between his expansive sides and the bottom of his lumpy pancake of an ass. Even when belted tightly enough to induce necrosis, pants barely stayed up a minute or two before inching down past his crack. He’d grown used to feeling it peeking out above his waistband all day, safely concealed under the untucked back of his shirt as long as he could avoid reaching up, bending down, or, ideally, moving at all.
As he and Jazz retreated into the silence of their phones, Emmett salivated over intrusive thoughts of blueberry and cinnamon sugar and began to cycle through his usual apps: email (junk), Pokémon GO (caught ’em all), Instagram (barely a like on his morning post). As he swiped through his stories—photos of ripped shirtless OnlyFans models, his brother’s kids, his mom’s morning latte—he came across an ad and paused.
The promoted story was bright, sleekly designed, and showed two versions of the same face, one morphing into the other. On the left side the woman was heavy and hangdog; on the right, thin, radiant, smiling, as if she’d shed a gray and dying blubber to reveal fresh, thriving skin underneath.
Groundbreaking weight loss clinical trial, read the accompanying text. Generous compensation provided.
Swipe up to learn more.
Emmett experienced an impulsive tug at the top of his abdomen like the one compelling him to reach for a muffin. Too late—the story elapsed while he was still taking it in.
He continued through his friends’ posts, or tried to, liking and commenting on almost every one. But despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get the ad out of his head. He backtracked to find it again. Grew desperate when it eluded him.
It wasn’t just that Emmett presently found himself at his highest-ever weight—somewhere in the high 310s, he guessed, having avoided the scale since the catastrophic collapse of his New Year’s resolution diet in the second week of January. It wasn’t just that “beach body season” was fast approaching, a meaningless weight loss industry scare tactic that nevertheless occupied more space in his mind than most actual holidays. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since college, surviving instead on periodic Grindr hookups that left him feeling more grotesque and disposable than the loneliness did. Or that he feared he’d already ruined his life with some as yet undiagnosed health disaster and would probably drop dead any moment of a heart attack or stroke, his lifeless body undulating across the floor, crack exposed, his fat laid bare for the whole world to see.
As much as any of that, he could really fucking use the cash.
His fifteen-minute break over, Emmett said goodbye to Jazz and resumed his post at the guest services desk. It was a typical weekday at Target. Traffic picked up around 11 a.m., and by lunchtime the line of customers waiting to collect online purchases was halfway to Bullseye’s Playground. There were issues with several orders, forcing Emmett to make hurried, out-of-breath trips back and forth across the store in search of this video game or that floor lamp—no, not the black one, the gold. A woman accused him of lying about the price of an air fryer and demanded to see his supervisor. A man insulted Emmett’s hair because the store’s AC wasn’t working.
Emmett clocked in and out for lunch but worked through, skipping his afternoon break so his coworker could leave early for an appointment. The appearance of an adorable five-year-old in a Pikachu costume brought him his only genuine smile of the day, before the child pointed up at the sweat patches under Emmett’s arms and squealed, “Ew. Fat boy stinks!”
Checkout was short-staffed, so for the final leg of his nine-hour shift Emmett was asked to fill in. His feet ached, arches throbbing. Or was it more of a prickle? He’d heard numbness in the feet was an early warning sign of diabetes. Could feet ache and be numb at the same time?
It was probably nothing, but he ought to get blood work done just to be safe. The thought filled him with dread. Unfortunately, safe was not a word he associated with the doctor’s office.
In between customers he switched to a register equipped with a stool for an off-duty cashier with a broken foot. He pulled the seat up to the counter and perched against it, his feet still throbbing as he scanned the next customer’s purchases.
A throb—definitely not a prickle.
Emmett was finally clocking out for the day when a voice spoke behind him. “Hey, Emmett, how’s it going?”
Emmett jumped. It was the store manager, Ricardo, aka Rick the Prick, a goateed goblin of a man who lorded his authority over the hourly staff like a good-humored king in a Haggar brand suit jacket.
“Hey, Rick,” Emmett said. “Scared me.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to give you a heart attack. That’s the last thing you need, eh? Ha! Say, would you mind stepping into my office?”
“Uh—” Emmett was already clocked out.
“It’ll be quick.”
He followed Rick to his office with a crawling feeling in his chest. Had he done something wrong? Was he being fired? He admitted his performance wasn’t what it used to be. After all these years without a promotion, he didn’t see the point of going above and beyond anymore.
The room was square and windowless, the red walls clashing with Rick’s collection of framed Padres jerseys. “Can you get the door?”
“Everything okay?”
“Nothing to worry about. Just want a quick word.”
They sat facing each other across the desk. Bobbleheaded baseballers nodded down at Emmett from the hutch, men he couldn’t have named for all the cash in the store. It was a long time ago now that his dad had taken him to Qualcomm Stadium to see the Padres play, back when Emmett was still trying to care about things his father approved of. The games ran together in his mind now: the same nine innings of boredom punctuated by a steady stream of all-beef hot dogs, unshelled peanuts, and ice cream.
“Say, Emmett, I got some feedback from one or two of your team members and I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Feedback?”
“Probably just a misunderstanding. A couple people mentioned you were sitting at your check stand this afternoon. Actually, I happened to notice that too.”
Rick was always doing this, using “feedback” as a cover for what were clearly his own opinions. Had anyone even said anything? Emmett bristled, knowing they likely had.
“Maybe you didn’t realize, but that stool’s for Josie to use while her foot heals.”
“Josie finished at three.”
“Right, of course. I wasn’t suggesting…” Rick rephrased: “It’s just that I think a couple people were a little… I mean, everyone would love to sit back and relax, wouldn’t they?”
“I wasn’t relaxing. I was working.”
“But working hard or…?”
The blood rushed to Emmett’s cheeks, his outrage squishy and tender.
“Look,” Rick said with a magnanimous smile, “if you say you were working, I believe it. I just wanted you to know how this kind of thing might look. No one wants to see a teammate sitting down on the job. Literally!” He barked out a laugh.
“Was there anything else?”
“No, no.”
Emmett rose, feeling his crack inching above his sagging belt. He resisted the urge to hike up his pants; in front of Rick, it would feel like defeat.
He opened the door.
“Actually, there was one other thing now I think about it. Someone made a comment—and I know the AC wasn’t working up front and it can get kind of sweaty.”
Emmett’s stomach dropped. Please don’t say it.
“Just maybe think about putting on an extra lick of deodorant in the morning, huh, buddy?”
A pair of teenage associates stopped in the hall as they were passing, their eyes flicking over Emmett’s body.
Spluttering into their hands, they hurried on.
Emmett felt the prickle return, this time hot behind his eyes.
Emmett had his phone out as he got into his car and started the ignition. The AC was broken here too—he couldn’t afford to get it fixed now that his rent had gone up—so he rolled down the windows to get a breeze through while he sat flipping through his stories. Not idly this time, but with intention. Where is it?
He fretted that it had gone, that he’d missed his chance.
A knot of tension loosened in his chest as he found it. Or rather, it found him.
The model gazed up at him with two pairs of eyes, one sad, the other sparkling out rays of inner joy. As his thumb hovered over the words learn more, Emmett wrestled with his better judgment.
He wasn’t dumb enough to be fooled by this. She was obviously Photoshopped, barely even real. This “groundbreaking” weight loss treatment probably wasn’t real either.
But the sick feeling tugging down on his heart, that was real.
The never-ending humiliation and degradation, that was real.
The feeling of being trapped inside his own body, inside his own life: that was as real as it fucking came.
Other than the obvious, what did he have to lose?
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