Speaking with John Marks,

Author of FANGLAND

You’ve written two previous novels, 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.  But this is the first time you’ve written a vampire tale.  What was the inspiration behind FANGLAND?

 Ever since I was a small child, I’ve had a fascination with vampires, and I can say exactly when and where that fascination began. Appropriately enough, given the subject matter of the novel, the source was television. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, ABC broadcast a supernatural soap opera called Dark Shadows, the quintessential story of the vampire with a heart of gold. My mother has told me that I became obsessed with the show. It both terrified and thrilled me, to the point where she had to ban it. I found ways to watch it in secret until I got busted again, but the experience of that show stayed with me. It was shot in video, as opposed to every other TV show I’d seen. The sets were constantly falling over. The acting was horrible. Yet, somehow, I felt that I was looking at a window onto the real world. Vampires existed on the other side of a very thin screen. Also, these were the years of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, race riots, you name it, and yet my world was a safe and fairly quiet one. I’ve often thought that Dark Shadows provided some window onto that wider world, albeit a distorted, fantastic one.

 At some point, dozens of vampire movies down the line, I actually read Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, and it was a blast. But I got a new perspective on that story when I worked as a journalist in eastern Europe and the Balkans. Stoker used Romania for his backdrop, a country that doesn’t have a vampire tradition of the kind in his tale. But just to the south, in Serbia, the tradition of the fanged undead, who rise from their graves to feed on the living, has a long and storied history. This was Stoker’s vampire, and I encountered the mythology at the same time that I reported on the margins of the Bosnian War. It may sound odd, but the convergence of two seemingly disparate mythologies, that of the vampire in folklore, and that of the fall of the Serbian nation at the battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, a backdrop to the justification for making war on the Bosnians, began to bounce off each other. I started to think about the ways that the vampire, a creature found in myriad varieties in almost every culture on earth, a creature steeped in blood and bloodshed, might be related to national mythologies surrounding war and its related devastations, and beyond that, to the endlessly violent history of mankind.

You were a producer for “60 Minutes.” In FANGLAND, your protagonist Evangeline Harker is a producer at a popular television newsmagazine “The Hour.”  Is this a tell-all in the guise of fiction?

I wouldn’t go that far.  There are certainly characters and events inspired by my experience at “60 Minutes” but foremost  FANGLAND is a loose version of the “Dracula” story, borrowing heavily from that novel’s world. What I will say is this: early on in my tenure at “60 Minutes,” I realized that the Dracula story could be happily updated in the setting of such a show, where employees travel to far flung corners of the globe, turning up secrets, messing around in places that most Americans would never go, seeking out people who most Americans would rather avoid. More than that, by the time that I arrived, “60 Minutes” had been the most successful news broadcast in the history of television for more than three decades and had developed its own internal culture that bore no relation to the culture in any office that I had ever seen. It was, in its own way, very spooky and Gothic, a land unto itself where logic didn’t always apply, where big personalities roamed the landscape in sometimes monstrous form, where a caste and class system made communication between people awkward and difficult under the best of circumstances. This is all deeply rich material for a novelist, but the extra added attraction, for me, lay in the possibilities unleashed by the insertion of a real monster into the midst of an already surreal environment.

 

Your book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the network news business.   Is it really that brutal?

It’s inherently brutal. First of all, the news business is always high pressure. Broadcast news, thanks to the enormous amount of money involved, and the huge egos, raises the pressure. Also, having to dress up information with pictures makes people go a little crazy. It’s one thing to write your own sentence. It’s another to have to track down the precise piece of tape to go with a complicated thought on a subject like the war in Iraq, and not merely the right picture, but a good picture. People who grew up in the business take that pressure for granted, but as someone from print, I couldn’t believe how difficult it could be. To get those pictures, you often had to write checks for thousands of dollars or write down budget requests for tens of thousands. That doesn’t do much good to your blood pressure. Also,, in print journalism, the highest paid people usually made well below seven figures. In network news, particularly a place as successful as "60 Minutes", you had people making movie star money, and that tends to skew the internal universe of an office in mostly bad ways. Money like that almost always introduces a strong element of politics and gets in the way of even the most dedicated journalism. Finally, the sense of responsibility that goes with a name like "60 Minutes" is profound. You drive yourself around the bend to live up to the standard. You enter upon epic bouts of self-loathing and self-recrimination and then the show shovels its own load on top of that. But then, "60 Minutes" was built to be a jungle. Don Hewitt, god love him, set up a show that would be Darwinian to its core. Every correspondent has his or her team, and every one on those teams is in competition with everyone else, and with every living soul on the other teams. One constantly looks over the shoulder. I would characterize the atmosphere as a truly gorgeous nastiness. But I honestly believed, and still do, that it made for a great TV show.

 

Why did you decide to leave?

I left for several reasons, all having to do with changes in management and the collapse of the “60 Minutes” Wednesday show. In brief, after three and a half decades running the show, Don Hewitt stepped down under some duress from the network. He and his team were replaced by the people who ran the Wednesday night version. In terms of management, the Wednesday show moved to Sunday nights, and the Sunday night show was simply cancelled, though there was continuity with the correspondents and some producers at first. I was lucky enough to work for one of the greats in American broadcast news, Morley Safer, but Morley was cutting back to half time and couldn’t keep all of his producers. So, rather than take another position, I decided to leave. And I did so on good terms. It was a difficult year for the entire news division, capped by the Dan Rather document scandal that  contributed , in the end, to the cancellation of the Wednesday show. Lots of people lost their jobs in the aftermath.

I wrote the novel, in some part, because I had witnessed this extraordinary transition. “60 Minutes” wasn’t simply another news show. It was the news show. Hewitt invented the form, just as he had brainstormed the idea of the Kennedy Nixon debates in 1960. On his team was a guy named Phil Scheffler who is reputed to have conducted the first live man on the street interview on television. We’re talking about the living history of a medium here. I had been lucky enough to work with the people who had been seminal in shaping the medium that supplied most of the American public with its news for half a century. I always felt that sense of history, of momentousness, about the place―and when the era ended, I felt that not enough had been done to dramatize the shift from that generation to one much younger and less experienced, less awe-inspiring. Only the supernatural could capture the sense of upheaval in the unreal world of network broadcast.

When I walked onto the “60 Minutes” floor for the first time, and I caught my first sight of Mike Wallace, it was truly like seeing  a ghost. I had watched him on televison since I was a small child, lying on the floor of a house that I hadn’t inhabited since I was fifteen or sixteen, and yet there he was, beyond all change, alive and well. I felt that way about Ed Bradley and Morley Safer, too. They were larger than life, and this was another argument in favor of a tale of the fantastic.

 

Much of your novel takes place in New York and the events of 9/11 impact your characters in many ways.   Did you always know that you would include 9/11 in your novel in some way?

 As I wrote, I realized that the subject was creeping in, but the more it appeared, the more it belonged. I was working at “60 Minutes” and living in New York when 9-11 happened. My wife and I walked home across the Queensborough Bridge, looking back at the smoke on the southern tip of the island. That night, ashes fell on our street like snow. I didn’t start writing the novel until much later, but as I began to tie together the strands that linked the world of the show to the world of my vampire and as I began to conceive of a creature who lived off the memory of human misery and suffering, I realized that the horrors of that day were already embedded in the tale. Part of my reason for writing the book had to do with the experience of that day, the difficulty of approaching it with any kind of rational understanding or emotional poise. It bears resemblance to no other day in my life and fit more happily into the world of the novel, which is an exceedingly dark place, than into the normal run of my life.

 

Did you think it was risky to include such a recent emotional and historical touchstone in a novel that is so entertaining?

I gave that a lot of thought, but in the end, I decided that this was an entertainment that justified the use. In our popular culture, we deal with our darkest nightmares through the medium of entertainment. Our serial killers, zombies, werewolves and vampires rise up out of the soup of urban crime, AIDS, domestic abuse and state-sanctioned torture. Horror tales―from the story of the Cyclops in the Odyssey and on―have always dealt with those terrible things that people fear the most, the unspeakable: war, rape, infanticide, disease, disaster of every kind. Stoker’s Dracula dealt with the dark sides of Victorian English culture, its fear of invasion by dark peoples, its fear of sexual license and national disintegration. I also think that Dracula is one of those prescient books foretelling the unprecedented violence of the coming Twentieth Century. World War I broke out less than two decades after its publication. So my book finds its horrific compass in the worst disaster of our own day, and I hope that it’s entertaining, that it is frightening in the best way, but I also hope that it raises those ugly questions about ourselves that only the horror genre can.

 

You must be one of the only living novelists who has appeared as a character in a Broadway play.  Can you explain?

About fifteen years ago, I was living in Berlin, Germany, working as a correspondent, when an old high school friend, Doug Wright, came to visit. Doug was a working playwright, and I had recently seen an amazing piece of impromptu theater in eastern Berlin. An elderly transvestite named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf gave tours of her Wilhelminian furniture collection in an old villa and told incredible stories about her life. I set up a private tour for Doug and a friend, and the experience made a deep impression. Several years later, he called me and told me that he’d finally figured out how to write a play about Charlotte and wanted to know if he include me, by name, as a character. Honestly, at the time, I couldn’t imagine that a piece about an aging East German transvestite would have much shelf life, but it didn’t matter. I gave Doug permission to use my name. In May 2003, the one-man show, I Am My Own Wife, appeared Off Broadway, and there I was onstage, inviting Doug to Berlin.  It was a bizarre, astonishing experience. That fall, the show went to Broadway, and the following year, it won the Tony and the Pulitzer for best drama, as well as a Tony for best acting. Doug’s newest play, Grey Gardens, is currently on Broadway but there are no characters resembling me in this one.

 

What are you working on next?

I’m writing a non-fiction book on American Christianity, a portrait of the life of the faith around the country.