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Chalupacabra Y2K

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Fast Food Just Got Freaky.

In the summer of Y2K, a slow night shift at TicoTaco takes a turn for the cursed when a couple of bored employees deep-fry something they definitely shouldn’t have. Now something greasy, pissed off, and way too into hot sauce is leaving behind a trail of empty packets and drained bodies.

Janet (burned out), Landon (baked), and Trina (bedazzled) are the only thing standing between the Chalupacabra and total chili cook-off carnage. They have no weapons training, no plan, and absolutely no business being the heroes in this story — but unfortunately, they’re all we’ve got.

Unknown Binding

First published September 22, 2025

43 people want to read

About the author

V.S. Lawrence

8 books113 followers
V.S. Lawrence grew up in Utah being scared of everything. Now, she puts her fears on paper, writing spooky books that feel like Scooby Doo chase music. When not writing, she can be found buried in a horror novel, wandering aimlessly, or cuddling her dog, Rigby. She is still scared of everything.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
Profile Image for Damien Casey.
Author 27 books89 followers
September 24, 2025
Let’s be so real right now… if you’re on the page for this book, then this book is 100% for you. If it isn’t, why did you click on a book called “Chalupacabra Y2K?” V.S. Lawerence provides everything I wanted here and then some. This is like that Sega game about slime and water guns. It’s comparable to a caramel apple empanada. You think, “well, this can’t be anything but bad ass,” and then you’re pleasantly surprised when it’s so much more than just a bad ass monster book. There’s humor, heart, vibe based plans, and some really good commentary about minimum wage fast food jobs (imagine having to take days off against your will and being even worse off money wise!). Heavy vibes of Night of the Comet pal around, The Blob style monster fun, The Inkeepers style fun, and someone named Trina who is one of my new favorite characters. K thx.
Profile Image for Rebecca White.
386 reviews30 followers
September 8, 2025
This has to be one of the funniest trips down Nostalgia Lane I’ve ever taken!

A giant chalupa running rampant in the streets of a small town right after Y2K? Sounds about right!

If you were alive during the mania of Y2K when we were all taping our windows shut, then you know anything was possible around that time. And VS Lawrence captures that perfectly!

The hell of being a fast food worker even sans killer deep fried dough, is spot on. The characters arcs. The hilarity that would make Christopher Moore and Grady Hendrix proud. The whole story was one big greasy, spicy, cheesy chef’s kiss 🧑‍🍳👌🏻💋
Profile Image for Bryan Farrell.
Author 2 books17 followers
October 29, 2025
Chalupacabra Y2K by V.S. Lawrence is the food-fighting, chilli-slinging, artery-clogging horror comedy romp I never knew I was hungry for.

When a new menu item at TicoTaco becomes sentient - not to mention monstrously hangry - it's up to very-over-it food server Janet, her laidback (aka stoned) coworker Landon, and Landon's permanently bedazzled girlfriend Trina to stop it before it eats its way through every fast food joint - and employee - in the city.

While giving the reader all the junky, greasy fun the premise promises, the author somehow manages to elevate a wacky food-based creature feature into something smarter, wittier, and more involving than you'd expect. Come for the food-based anarchy, stay for an exploration of female friendships, service worker comradery, Y2K-hysteria, and chapter titles like "For Whom The Taco Bell Tolls" 😂
Profile Image for Adam Allen.
265 reviews7 followers
September 2, 2025
We read for a lot of reasons. At its heart, however, we read because we like to be told a story. And this book is a storyteller having so much fun telling their tale that it is infectious and leaves a huge goofy smile on your face the entire time you’re reading it.

I truly loved this novella and read it in one sitting. It is exactly what you think it’s going to be but it also has so much heart, the three main characters are relatable, three dimensional, and completely lovable.

The Chalupacabra itself is ridiculous as hell but still somehow intimidating and gnarly also! Lawrence is so good at dialogue and being able to capture a character in the first couple of exchanges, but she also is so good at sensory writing, especially smells in this one. I honestly gagged a few times and I promise you that’s a huge compliment 😂 .

Get this one as soon as possible! It drops September 22nd and you will side eye every Taco Bell you see from the moment you read it, if you don’t already, of course.
Profile Image for Ziggy Nixon.
1,214 reviews39 followers
March 18, 2026
It literally makes zero sense.

"Chalupacabra Y2K" is easily one of the most wackadoodle adventure stories I've read in like, gosh, days! Even author V.S.Lawrence has the good-natured humility to admit that "it’s easily the stupidest thing I’ve ever written" and describes the situation via her cast at times with statements like "This is insane… This is absolutely bananas" and even "this is full-on tinfoil hat territory". Granted I only know her work so far from the delightfully gory and offal-filled camp(y) horror tale "With Friends Like These" (a must!!! read), but even with that small sampling, I have to agree with her sentiments entirely. This was funny, crazy, and totally insane with a serious side of extra what-the-fvck sauce slathered on. Call it Crazy Baja Supreme™ if you want to get into the spirit of things!

The Deluxe TicoTaco Special comes with regret. And also sour cream.

Our story - which takes place in the days of Y2K which is a definitely important fact to help set the scene, trust me - follows Janet and Landon, co-workers at the local TicoTaco, which is snuggled amongst a host of other fast food joints in, um, this place that we are. It also includes Landon's main squeeze, Trina, who under normal circumstances would be the extremely pretty, definitely too perky and overly cheerful character we all meet at the beginning of the movie, knowing she would be the one to be killed first, most likely by running in her underwear and bra directly TOWARDS the dangerous stabby person. These three are together about to go on the ride of their lives, in no small part owing to their own "innocent" shenanigans.

Something really weird is going on.

For you see, our intrepid team just happens to discover the ingredients on stock for a new menu item they're introducing in the coming days - hint: it's chalupas which I don't think I've ever even seen let alone ordered - and decide they've just got to try one out. So they load one up with all the fixin's, you know, just regular texmex stuff but then remember they've already cleaned the "normal" fryer, that already sounds about as gross as my sweaty underwear. Well, leave it up to fate, who as we all know is a total asshole, but apparently there's a second such machine on hand, one that hasn't been cleaned let alone used since the night Y2K was supposed to have killed us all. No such luck here even though "ol' sparky" does wind up acting like one of Dr. Frankenstein's most impressive gizmos with all the flashing electrical, zappy stuff, right before it bursts into flames.

Double meat, double cheese… And a fuckton of regret.

But no harm, no foul, right, including for all "things born of grease and bad ideas"? And no one wants to actually eat the abomination that emerges from the fryer's primordial ooze ("It looked mostly like a regular taco, if a taco survived a nuclear incident."), so they close down for the evening… only to have to return for first shift the next day, whereupon they discover a store-closingly horrible situation. Something has ransacked the place and seemingly escaped OUT the window, a fact the cops are all too willing to ignore. Had to be vandals breaking IN, right? Vandals that (a) didn't take anything, (b) somehow left deep claw marks all over the place and (c) sucked dry every ounce of hot sauce available. Well, tell that to the people who get killed in the coming days at some of the other restaurants, where the cops manage to … well, they remain as useless as ever even as the body count grows. Anyway, the restaurants that had any kind of hot sauce on hand are the ones attacked and that counts officially as a "clue"!

You’d never know there was a sentient deep-fried taco creature on the loose.

So for those of us with experience with these sort of tales - or even anyone whose seen movie series like "Alien" or "Jurassic Park" or even any of the "Good God, They Made Another Fokkers Film?" group - knows that disaster is not just looming, it's getting ready to go to town on everyone, if not the world itself! So many things get eaten, the police ignore things some more despite evidence to the contrary, and we're all building up to the big show-down at - you guessed it - the annual Chili Day festival. It all moves along at quite a brisk pace and to say that the climax is, well, climatic and quite exciting is another one of them there fancy understatement things. It's a ton of fun filled with heroism, emotion, and enough rancid meat and beans to make anyone want to get sprayed in the mouth with those special "water" pistols our heroes invent!

She surveyed her comrades… and knew deep down there was no way they were surviving this.

Lawrence certainly provides us with not only a situation that is legitimately nuts but that also remains legitimately plausible. And in a flash of what can only be called "I really liked that ending!" (I'm still working on that phrase, sorry), we're delivered a possible view into what awaits us in the future, just like the horror movies like to do. So overall, this was a lot of fun and a quick read. Yeah, I wish the editing had been a little more in tune, but unless you're willing to pay full price for a fancy meal sometimes, you just have to take your TickyTacky (ha!) complaints and live with them. Me? I swear after this - and an unintentional sequence of cannibalism-based books I've read throughout February and March - I may be considering becoming a vegan. Also because I can't see anything coming to life with crap like that in it at all…
Profile Image for E.D. Black.
Author 3 books8 followers
October 8, 2025
First things first, I absolutely love books about food turning into monsters (hence why I wrote Don’t Open the Oven), and I love cryptids, so let’s just say this book was definitely made for me. Because guess what else I love? Fast food tacos.

Janet hates her job at TicoTaco but really enjoys working with her stoner co-worker, Landon. One night after closing, with the help of Landon’s ditz and glamorous girlfriend, Trina, make a late-night snack. They fire up the old fryer that’s been glitching out and cook up a chalupa. Well, not just a Chalupa.

Next thing you know, fast food employees start dying off, hot sauce packets vanish, and something that should’ve stayed in the deep fryer is looking for seconds. The final showdown happens at a chili cook-off, and honestly, it’s prefect.

This book is crunchy, spicy, and just the right amount of ridiculous, the kind of read that goes down easy but hits you later like a gas station burrito. It’s fast, fun, and filled with the perfect amount of camp to keep you smiling through the carnage. I love a quick, goofy read, and this was exactly that! Great story and well executed, teetering on the edge of corny but never crossing it. Great read; I’ll enjoy it again.
Profile Image for David Washburn.
Author 8 books143 followers
November 25, 2025
In what is my introduction to V.S. Lawrence, I chose the shorter and sillier of options. Suckered in by the goofy title and playful artwork on the cover morbid curiosity won, and by the end of the book, I felt like I won for having read this.

Wow! This one is so much fun. What I love about this one is that it’s exactly what you think you’re getting when you see the cover. A throwback to buddy-comedy horror. This was executed so well and I’ll never not associate future Taco Bell visits with this book moving forward.

The writing itself is snappy and tangled up in sarcastic wit while also maintaining the same spirit as a movie like Gremlins or Sharknado. The plot is simple and the book is short so why not just check it out for yourself?

While reading there is a scene where the Chalupacabra is bigger and someone refers to it as a “Chalupacabra Deluxe” and I was dead 😂—BRILLIANT!
Profile Image for From The Reader’s Nest.
354 reviews4 followers
September 1, 2025
This is one of my favorite books - maybe ever! This book was so much fun and I enjoyed every single moment of it.

The chapter titles are so witty!! FUNNY!!
VS Lawrence kept me laughing constantly.

I love the characters and the friendships in this book so much. The seriously gross descriptions of food, haha!

Anything and everything that comes to mind with tacos was included in this book. Coming from someone who really feels that tacos are a love language, and a long time Taco Bell fan, this book was so very clever. I can honestly say I didn’t want it to end.

The nostalgic references go so hard! ( Passions, oh my god! )

My heart is full and happy! This is what makes reading fun. Books like this. Absolutely delightful!!!
Profile Image for Katie (DeathByPaperbacks).
61 reviews12 followers
April 9, 2026
This book now lives rent free in my brain just for how fun it was! Chalupacabra Y2K looked like everything I would ever want in a campy creature feature, then V.S. Lawrence went and stuffed it full of perfectly timed one liners, threw in a few of my new favorite characters, added a dollop of heart warming friendship, and smothered it all in extra hot sauce 🤤

This was one of the most ridiculous books I’ve devoured this year and I loved every bite of it. It doesn’t get any better than this and I HIGHLY recommend taking a trip to TicoTaco 🌮
Profile Image for Matthew Mercer.
Author 5 books86 followers
September 22, 2025
You have to love and admire when an author takes a break from their usual routine, stressful writing process and chooses to write a story for the pure sake of entertaining themselves. Fortunately for us, that story gets to see the light of day and yes, it was a Baja Blast.

Y2K may not have been the end of the world, but that doesn't mean everything continued as normal. One deep fryer in the lovable Tico Taco was affected and became the birthing place of a monster who's not just thirst isn't only quenched by hot sauce, but by blood. As the bodies start to pile up, a group of friends have a feeling they know who—or what—is behind it, but when the story is so unbelievable that nobody will listen, they have to confront the beast themselves.

I read this novella in a single sitting and recommend you do the same! It is such a good time, and V.S. Lawrence is so great at writing these spooky, fun-time thrillers.
Profile Image for Joey Powell.
Author 8 books47 followers
November 19, 2025
The kind of fun, popcorn-movie, weird-science book we need right now, featuring a wacky premise, and wonderful descriptions of our star Chalupacabra.

Lawrence has a knack for getting us invested in characters early on. Our blue-collar workers are relatable and adorkable, so when these Average Joes are thrust into an extraordinary situation, you can't help but root for them.

The finale is appropriately silly and thrilling. (Chilli) chef's kiss.
Profile Image for Corey.
57 reviews
January 24, 2026
This book is dumb, but it is incredibly fun. It had so many rough out loud moments. Imagine creating a chalupa monstrosity, deep frying it and having a spark bring your creation to life! I loved all the characters, I kept imagining Matthew Lillard as Landon. Trina is the real run away star of this book. If you haven't read anything from V.S. Lawrence, I highly suggest you give this a chance, or her book 80's Ghosts.
Profile Image for Mike Schilling.
51 reviews
October 3, 2025
I've heard before from others reviewing this book, but this truly is the spirit of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps repackaged for adults. A story about a mutant chalupa full of friendship, laughs, human remains, and used hot sauce packets. If looking for a quick read with nostalgia-driven entertainment value, I'd highly suggest you pick this story up.
Profile Image for Elle Keating.
Author 2 books11 followers
November 8, 2025
This book was so much fun! Yes, it is an outlandishly crazy plot about a mutant chalupacabra but my god does the author really pull you into this world. I adored the characters and the growing friendship between Janet and Trina. I laughed with them and was obsessed to find out how this would end. Very well written and worth the read!
Profile Image for Anf.
2 reviews
December 27, 2025
A fast and frantic monster story built from the ground up to entertain and remind of all those Saturday morning cartoons 90s kids grew up adoring. Packed with delightfully absurd action and nostalgia, filled with heart and humour - if you were raised with Goosebumps and Tales From The Crypt or enjoy quirky and outside of the norm tales - this is perfect for any Weekend on the couch.
Profile Image for Lucy A. McLaren.
Author 5 books56 followers
February 20, 2026
A fun, quick-paced horror read that is both utterly ridiculous and satisfyingly horrible in its execution (I won't quickly forget the idea of certain slurping sounds... shudder). Lawrence's writing is, as always, excellent, with characters who are well-realised and easy to empathise with/connect to--even if they are fighting a giant chalupa!
Profile Image for Tasha.
514 reviews12 followers
March 8, 2026

A fantastically hysterical story. This is one of those rare gems you find just by searching for some horror stories. When you come across a story like this, it’s a nice change of pace. There definitely is a lot of icky body waste and gore.

So completely ridiculous, I can’t help but love it! Absolutely one for the tbr. Especially if you find yourself in a reading rut.
Profile Image for Aleks T (alisbookedup).
48 reviews3 followers
September 23, 2025
I blinked at this book like I’d just been handed a live fish. Honestly, one of the funniest, most creative and heartfelt stories of friendship I’ve ever read. I had already told 7 people about it before I finished it, but now you’ll never get me to shut up about it.
Profile Image for Taliesin Govannon.
144 reviews3 followers
September 27, 2025
How DO you kill a chalupa?

This is, without a doubt, one of the most fun stories I've read in years! This isn't just retro horror, this is absurdist storytelling of the highest order.

Seriously, it's like TROMA made a movie out of a Kevin Smith screenplay.

This is scream-out-loud funny... ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️!!!
Profile Image for Jessica Gleason.
Author 40 books77 followers
December 3, 2025
You had me at monster chalupa.

This is a fun book that evokes a nostalgic sense of the tacos of my youth, less alive and hungry for spice and innards, but you know what I mean, right?

Tacos, hot sauce, and rampaging. Oh, my.
Profile Image for Jo Swords.
74 reviews2 followers
October 7, 2025
I am not sure what the hell I just read, BUT I loved it. It was such a fun read, and I don't think I have ever read anything like it before 🌮
Profile Image for Deep Arya.
Author 5 books13 followers
November 2, 2025
Perfect, funny, well-liked characters with absurdity horror at its wildest.
Profile Image for Mallory McCartney.
Author 10 books501 followers
November 11, 2025
Looking for a fun as hell, fast paced and spicy (iykyk) book? Then please do yourself a favor and pick this up! I devoured it in 24 hours and loved every second
Profile Image for Fletch.
71 reviews1 follower
March 25, 2026
That was so cheesy, fun and full of heart. Loved it.
Profile Image for Robert King II.
Author 1 book7 followers
April 19, 2026
Super fun and silly, although I think it could’ve used more Chalupacabra
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews