I'm looking for a book that I read about ten years ago in German. Unfortunately, most of the detail escaped my memory, and the little I remember might be wrong, but it might help identify the story anyways.
- The setting was a small town in the north eastern US, probably New England
- The protagonist was male and probably a journalist or detective
- People in the area were disappearing and/or dying mysteriously, and this has been happening before and/or for a while
- A part of the story I remember rather well is that the protagonist investigates the local church's parish register. He notices, that some entries are annotated with "W". It is later revealed that "W" stands for "worm" and that those people have been transformed into worms
- While investigating some facility (I remember it as a silo, but it could be something else), the protagonist comes across a strange, worm-like creature
The story seems similar to Stephen King's Jerusalem's Lot or Salem's Lot. I don't think it is any of the two however, because there weren't any vampires as far as I remember, and there wasn't just one giant mythical worm, but rather, people were systematically transformed into worms for some sinister purpose, almost like they were bred or farmed. It could be though, that I remember that wrong and it is in fact one of those.
