I know exactly nothing about Anne Rice works either. But it's true that vampires always represented lust and sins that humans find hard to overcome. By abandoning humanity and being 'abandoned by God' as Sunako put it, they're also abandoning the morals that govern the world (morals that were even more important in the 19th century when vampire fiction was really starting to roll) and by preying on humans, they bring down their morals too. In Dracula at least, the female vampire Lucy preyed on young men by playing on their suppressed lusts, and on young children by corrupting their innocence. These elements of corruption and loss of innocence seem to be abandoned in favor of wangst and wimpiness these days. Also, there's a scene in Dracula when the Count takes the blood of a young woman and it's obviously supposed to remind the reader of a rape scene...

I really dislike Sunako too. I hate her attitude of dramatically 'figuring out just what I've become' and, convinced that she's abandoned by God and can't do anything about it, continues to use her position to wreak havoc and be a pretentious little twat. But I always saw her as kind of accepting that she's a beast that needs to hunt humans--cause she's not one of them anymore (which is a fact that's really highlighted in older vampire works, that they're not human now) and so she does whatever she wants. Theeeen, she whines that God doesn't forgive her...but would God forgive a human that committed the same crimes as she did? If she's 'only trying to survive', who forced her to gather up the Kirishiki cult and then use said cult to create an undead village just so she can be herself? Screw you, Sunako!

I saw the monologues too, but I haven't watched Shiki since I started to read the translation, so I didn't put two and two together to realize that's where the preview voiceovers were from! I thought they were kind of odd, just stuck onto the end of the episode to build drama. Turns out they're actually canon, huh.
I'm not all that familiar with visual novels, how do they work? I've seen some screenshots, but I just always kinda thought they were like subtitled anime, except you have to click when you're ready to go to the next screen.
You could get away with just using characters, if you put them against some Shiki-esque background, like black and white photos of pine trees. That would be very Sotoba.

I'm really wondering how Ono will handle all the action at the end! So far the story's been slow-paced, I'm curious to read it fast-paced.