Fangland: A Novel

Traveling to Romania on behalf of her popular television news magazine, Evangeline Harker investigates a notorious crime boss named Ion Torgu, only to disappear and awaken several months later in a Transylvanian monastery with no memory of what happened to her.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Professional and personal aspirations collide when Evangeline, an ambitious associate producer of The Hour ("the most successful news show in American television history") accepts Robert's wedding proposal just before jetting off on an assignment she would rather dodge. Her uber-producer dismisses her protestations, so it's off to Transylvania to evaluate a possible story on Romanian reputed crime lord Ion Torgu. Marks' sense of place (a horse and wagon in front of a Coke sign symbolizes the transition from communism) and tone-setting emphasis on blood and bloodlines kick in early as Evangeline mulls over blending her Italian Irish heritage and Robert's mix of Creek Indian and the U.S. marshals who fought them, a union represented for her by the engagement ring she insists on wearing to meet the small, pale Torgu, who proves a kind of terrorist, and who infects her "like a virus" when she is abducted. She resurfaces months later, recuperating in Transylvania and recalling nothing. A scary twenty-first-century take on the stuff of Dracula, worthy of its rightful place among others. Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

John Marks is a critically acclaimed novelist and former 60 Minutes producer. His fiction includes The Wall, named a Notable Book of 1998 by the New York Times, and War Torn, named one of the best novels of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.

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