Fangland

Four talented narrators tackle a modern-day vampire tale, told via emails, therapy journals, and diaries. The story starts at "The Hour," a documentary TV show. The author's history as a "60 Minutes" producer gives realism to the depiction of an average workday and makes the story's ghastly details even more chilling. Listeners journey with Assistant Producer Evangeline Harker to Romania to lure an Eastern European gangster on-screen. Instead the interview serves as a vehicle that gives Dracula himself access to a post-9/11 New York City. Harker's disappearance and resurgence months later at a Transylvanian monastery wreaks havoc with the lives of the entire staff of the news show from the lowliest editor to the aging and paranoid senior executive. D.P.D. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

June 25, 2007
The unusually large cast that reads Marks’s multiperspective, modern vampire story helps make up for the lack of special effects one might expect. There is no creepy music, no doors creaking or wind shrieking through the trees to augment the tale of what happens after Evangeline Harker, a lovely assistant producer of a venerable TV news show, travels to Romania to meet a fabled gangster. Her trip goes horribly wrong and soon her colleagues in New York are afflicted as well. Marks, a former 60 Minutes
producer, is at his best when writing about the life of the newsroom, which we witness through the conversation and thoughts of people who are all concerned about Harker’s disappearance and the horrors that have followed, but who observe each other and the rest of the show’s staff with keen distrust and disdain. This reading adds little to the chilling story aside from the varied voices, yet as a novel take on the worn-out vampire story, with a steady drumbeat of macabre events alternating with dryly funny commentary, it is sure to hold listeners until the end. Simultaneous release with the Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6).

Starred review from November 6, 2006
Former 60 Minutes
producer Marks (The Wall
) puts his experience on the legendary TV news magazine to good use in this highly inventive reimagining of Bram Stoker's Dracula
. His naïve protagonist, Evangeline Harker, a young producer for the TV news show The Hour
, reluctantly accepts an assignment into the wilds of Romania to explore doing a segment on a legendary criminal figure, Ion Torgu. Evangeline soon finds herself at the very outskirts of civilization, and after hearing a missionary's account of a supernatural plague that affected a whole community in Africa, she's accosted by Torgu himself, doing an excellent impersonation of the vampire count. Her subsequent imprisonment in a deserted hotel also parallels Stoker's tale, but Marks manages to make the familiar fresh, so that even devotees of the original will find themselves rapidly turning pages and being drawn into Evangeline's fate and the stories of her friends and colleagues at The Hour
.

June 1, 2007
Evangeline Harker, producer for Sunday news show The Hour, is sent to Romania to interview crime lord Ion Torgu for a possible segment. Although imprisoned by Torgu and infected by his strange vampirism, she eventually manages to escape. After months of self-exile in a Romanian convent, she returns to New York, finding it much changed. During her absence, Torgu has shipped himself to The Hour's offices, and strange things are happening on the 20th floor. This retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula dwells little on the supernatural bells and whistles of modern horror fiction, instead burrowing into the evil heart of the tale. Instead of a castle, Torgu inhabits a creepy derelict hotel; his "brides" are brutish Greek laborers. No fangs for this vampire but a knife and bucket to slit the throats of his victims and harvest their blood. Ellen Archer, as the voice of Evangeline, is a compelling presence, but the voices of the characters at the news organization (Todd McLaren, Michael Prichard, and Simon Vance) are less successful. The New York section of the story is told in a collection of emails, voice messages, and journal entries, which makes it difficult to maintain an atmosphere of suspense. The term "Fangland" is used by a character to describe the sharks running the show. Recommended for all fiction collections.Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.