Fangland

By John Marks
It’s been a long time since I read any horror, because, you know, me and horror don’t get along so well, so I’m not sure if I’m correct here, but I think this book might, well, be sneaking over into the horror genre. There are no ice picks involved, or chainsaws or people being skinned or anything (not directly, anyway) and the book cover doesn’t make use of dripping blood; the horror it contains is more of an intellectual quality - the horror that has been inflicted on real persons throughout the centuries.

Interestingly, also, Fangland is a post-9/11 horror story; the horror that was nearly 3000 people’s last moments (plus all the associated shock and emotional damage that was the survivors’) is woven into the narrative. I’ve only read one other book that was quite so directly a post-9/11 novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; and although I thought Foer’s book was excellent, I think Fangland was more effective at capturing what the events of that day did to the city of New York.

Fangland is a modern take on the vampire legend, and at the start I thought it was going to be a bit too clever for itself, but I ended up really quite liking it. I will look for other novels by John Marks. It is set (for a good part of the action) in the offices of a television current affairs program (The Hour) in downtown New York, located just next door to the holes that exist where the World Trade Centre used to stand. The rest of the story is set in Romania, as we follow what happens to one Evangeline Harker, who has been sent there by her bosses at The Hour to assess the possibility of a story on an Eastern European crime lord called Ion Torgu.

The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of different characters; for me it was Evangeline’s voice that read best, challenging my pet theory that it is difficult for men to write convincing female characters and vice versa. (I can’t really test the vice versa; male characters written by women often seem quite convincing to me, but what would I know? You blokes will have to confirm/deny). Not all of the book works for me and there are, to paraphrase the C&C Music Factory, a few bits that made me go “Hmmm” - such as the scene in which Evangeline uses her sexuality to fend off an attack by Torgu. To paraphrase the evil Mexicans in For a Fistful of Dollars, “ehhhh??” I suppose at least it wasn’t the same old “vampires are sooo sexy” thing that most authors peddle. But overall, the book was moving and chilling…if you feel in the mood for a vampire novel, definitely read this one over Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

Rating: 8 out of 10