I've been trying to track down details of a neat story I read years ago that told several tales about people living in an overpopulated Earth where Vampires and other mythological creatures were now real.
What I can remember ...
- The Earth was critically overpopulated
- A well resourced group decided the problem was a lack of human predators and set out to create a few new ones based on classic mythology, seeking to "thin the herd" by eliminating the weakest
- They released some kind of contageous vector (a virus?) that resulted in a very small proportion of fetuses being modified in-utero, though the effects didn't become evident until puberty
- They chose this approach because it would take effect on a global scale, and so they wouldn't themselves know who the predators were
- Several kinds of predator, including Vampires and Werewolves - but Vampires are the ones that stuck in my mind
- Vampires were long lived, incredibly strong and needed blood to survive - at puberty they lost the ability to make something found in blood, so they needed another source. They were pale (something to do with their blood problems?) but didn't otherwise have any problems with exposure to the Sun.
There were several stories, though I can't remember whether it was a book of short stories or several plot lines in one larger story. One of the story lines started with some kind of investigation into a series of gruesome murders that took place as the first of the "new-predators" reached puberty, and lead into the discovery of what had been done.
At the end of the book, everyone was adjusting to "the new normal", a world where vampires, werewolves and other creatures were real, rare but dangerous.
I read this either in late high school or while at university, so I'd peg the timeframe as between 1987 and 1993.
