An Acquired Taste

[Robert_Moriyama]

I didn't ascribe the rather plummy language to the pomposity of the narrator / protagonist (although it does make sense from that standpoint), but assumed that it was a deliberate hommage* to the formal style of Stoker and his contemporaries. Also, although the story seems to indicate otherwise, I wondered if the narrator was himself a survivor of that period (i.e., a lot older than he looked or knew himself to be)...

RM

(*Now that's pompous.)

[Robert_Moriyama]

There is a theory that both vampires and werewolves were actually sufferers of a genetic disorder that causes anemia, light sensitivity, and hairiness... So let's imagine that a group of people suffering from these disorders fled from Eastern Europe and established a village in a remote part of Italy. They may not BE vampires, but might believe themselves to be such. Living in isolation, eventually they end up as a whole village full of people with the same genetic disorder, expressed in varying degrees of severity.

Now, over the years, some people (with less-obvious symptoms) leave either the original Eastern European village, or the Italian colony. Intermarriage with non-"vampires" reduces the severity of the disorder to the point where the descendants seem "normal", but still carry the recessive genes. This makes their blood TASTE better than the blood of unrelated people (or animals), a delicacy... making it worth it to track down descendants of the original population, as an alternative to bleeding the current residents.

As for the stored blood -- I would suspect that it is diluted, and treated with some herbal equivalent of an anticoagulant.*

(*A practice noted in the "Forever Knight" TV series, I think -- Nick adds some kind of anticoagulant to the bottles of blood he keeps in the refrigerator, and almost chokes on it when he forgets to do so.)