Given the title and fantastic cover art, I expected a quasi-comic
vampire riot with sarcastic stompings on the network broadcast news
business. I put off reading it for almost a year until I recently
needed something to break through the melancholy of serious literature
that was giving me a headache and rationalization to kick inanimate
objects. What I got was a pseudo-serious novel trying its best to
hold down the ridiculousness of its situation while attempting to
illustrate how modern news media sucks the life out of its subjects
as well as its documenters. You see, "Fangland" is not referred to
as vampire territory, but to the backbiting, idea stealing, petty
ego politics of the news business. To succeed, as one character puts
it, you need “the capacity to suffer in vain all things” (Penguin Press,
ISBN 9781594201172, c. 2007
p.323).
Fangland brazenly borrows its storyline and expository
style from Bram Stoker's Dracula of 1897. You know this
on your first outing, as the Chapter One narrator is named Evangeline
Harker—read the Avenging Angel of Jonathan Harker—who is an associate
producer for a TV newshow called The Hour —read 60 Minutes —and
is on her way to Transylvania to open up the ultra-badass and enigmatic
crime boss of Eastern Europe and see if he'll play to American TV
audiences. The major deal breaker is if he doesn't speak English,
because subtitles are an instant channel changer.
As expected, things go promptly purple for our self-described “soft
news samurai” (p.11). Ion Torgu, the diabolical gangster who's supposedly
draining the community's lifeblood faster than a dialysis machine,
apparently is doing just that. He cuts a far more slovenly
figure than the Count. With a massive, bulging head highlighted by
red eyes and black, crumbling teeth—no biting power here!—he's shambling
around in a white leisure suit reeking as if “made of the living
skin of humans under interrogation” (p.342). And, like Anton Chigurh
with his captive bolt pistol, Torgu drags a bucket and a throat-cutting
blade to exsanguinate a blood malted when he feels the need. Turns
out Torgu is not so much a traditional vampire as an ambassador of
the 200 million or so deaders of the 20th century put down by war,
genocide, or just garden-variety murder. He requires an invitation
to The Hour to broadcast their stories—and hypnotize the
audience into joining them. He's “two million years of murder in
the form of a man” (p.202).
The rest of the novel takes place at The Hour's
office on the twentieth floor across from the Twin Towers crater
in The Apple. Author Marks did time as a producer for 60 Minutes,
so he's a solid tour guide through the workaday, inner world of TV
newscasting. But after the intense first-person tribulations of Ms.
Harker at Torgu's burnt-out hotel—no, it's not named the Hyperion
Hotel, for all you Angel fans
out there—the account fragments
among the employees into e-mails, diary and therapy journals, other
1P point-of-views, and good ol' third-person omniscient. Torgu's
coming influence is premiered in received blank tapes that pervert
the IT databases so that the chanted whispers of atrocity sites—“Thessalonika,
Treblinka, Golgotha, Solferino, Lepanto, Kalawao, Kukush” (p.96)—can
percolate through the workspace. Austen Trotta, the Prof. Van Helsing
stand-in, is close when he thinks “the September [11th] disaster
lies at the root of this entire thing”, but he foists it off as “a
delayed collective hallucination” (p.293). Things start to get serious
when large crates from Romania arrive.
Fangland flirts around with the pomposities and
paranoia of fame, and the ineffectiveness of condensing complex
new stories to inadequately-quick, editorialized blurbs, as well
as humanity's short attention span and apparent callousness toward
suffering and slaughter. These are deep subjects, but not necessarily
new ones, and author Marks adds no further revelations. Facing
our own barbarity, “the
one blessed thing we have,” an already-dead character says, is “our
animal capacity to forget” (P. 328). The most damning sketch of those
who peddle insight and truth over the airwaves is seen in Ed Prince—“a
ham-fisted wheedler . . . the face of [The Hour's] broadcast
for millions” (P.238-9)—as he nakedly sits in front of a TV and camera,
hysterical that he's now immortal but cannot see himself on screen.
This is not the re-imagining of a cultural icon for the
entertainment-addicted 21st Century. In fact, it is probably the
downfall of the novel that author Marks chose to so mulishly follow
not only Stoker's plotline, but its format as well. The singular
and forceful narrative at the beginning serves to point out how
diffused the read becomes once it's handed off to other, lesser-drawn
characters. That carefully-established
vicegrip of impending malignancy diminishes with the same
imputation that hovers over a big-screen actioneer when burdened
with too much CGI in the hopes of making it appear more realistic.
Any notions, reveries, or asides seem to similarly go grainy under
this technique, leaving a fun read, albeit an over-ambitious one.
