[Update:
askmefi got it in like four seconds. Ordering now.
Amusingly, and, true to form, I'd forgotten about the overarching romance plot where the protagonist's girlfriend joins the parasite club. Goes to show.]
Um, hey, internet, does any of you remember a short(?) scifi story wherein:
A guy moves to a planet for some reason, and finds that almost everyone there is unusually happy, and is host to a reddish jellylike parasite. It can be a tiny mole-sized dot, or a big drapey amoebic blob of semitransparent stuff that covers large parts of the person's body, and dissolves it slowly. The guy is grossed out by this, but is told by everyone who has the parasites that they feel great because the parasites pump euphoria chemicals into them, or maybe it's just that they make the people feel connected to everyone else with the parasite. The parasites have probably made some sort of psychic link with the other parasites, and the humans get to share in this? Maybe this isn't true. I can't exactly remember the draw.
The guy eventually goes to a cave outside of town which is where people go to die, when they're mostly consumed by their parasite, and inside is this gigantic seething mass of red ooze with bones visible inside it. The people are not alarmed by this because the parasite absorbs them and their consciousness somehow continues inside it, so they have contact with everyone else it has absorbed. They regard this as some kind of concrete afterlife, and the guy also eventually comes to regard this as a good bet in terms of immortality.
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