cover image Fangland

Fangland

John Marks, . . Penguin Press, $25.95 (400pp) ISBN 978-1-59420-117-2

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.)