The setting for "Blood Music" is sketchy, apparently a common, undistinguished American city where the principal characters live in apartments, and this ordinariness of place may well be a deliberate authorial device to heighten the reader's identification with the horror inherent in the story. The acts with terrible consequences committed by Vergil occur in a community familiar to the novelette's audience; their homes, their apartments, and their streets could be the setting for the beginning of the end of humanity and its collective aspirations.