Ebola would be much less sexy than vampirism, and much, much scarier, even without the gore. Although, the novel spares us no details in that department either, really. Sure, we all expect the slaughtering and experimenting to be pretty gruesome but sometimes it takes you by surprise, like Ozaki copping a few feels on Gotouda's lady parts to see if her bowels or bladder released after she died.

What about a gang story? Natsuno and his family actually moved to Sotoba to get out of a territorial yakuza gang they were in---they haven't mentioned it yet, but Yuuki's missing a part of his pinky, and he says he lost it wood working. The shop's a cover for that. The Kirishikis are another gang and, even though the Yuukis tried to leave it, when it turns out the Kirishikis are the Crips to the Yuuki's Bloods (harharhar) those old hateful feelings a hard to fight, and this town of deep regional bonds is about to get even more tightly knit, even further stranded from society as it sinks into another kind of underworld all together.