For the purposes of narrative the vampires must have a nature to struggle against (“We lift the lemons and swing them to our faces. I slept in coffins, in black cedar boxes, and woke every night with a fierce headache.” As in “The New Veterans,” the story’s ending both confirms and belies its myths. A vampire named (in a characteristic gesture for Russell, who treasures such sparks of postmodernist humor) Clive recalls his years “on the blood,” before he learned from his wife - “the first and only other vampire I’d ever met” - that the old stories about them were lies: “I listened to the village gossips and believed every rumor, internalized every report of corrupted bodies and boiled blood. The collection’s title story, which is, as advertised, about vampires in a lemon grove, contains a similar moral.
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