Publishers Weekly

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'sDracula . His naïve protagonist, Evangeline Harker, a young producer for the TV news showThe 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 atThe Hour .
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Library Journal

* New York TV producer Evangeline Harker travels to Transylvania to interview reputed Eastern European crime boss Ion Torgu for a segment on The Hour. They meet one evening in the town of Brasov, where Torgu strongly suggests that they will be more comfortable at his own hotel in a desolate area only a short distance away. Although wary of this sinister man, Evangeline reluctantly agrees but that night finds herself locked in her room. Her attempt to escape takes her down an unlit, fetid stairwell, where she encounters Torgu at his most monstrous, chanting words of death and feasting on blood. Meanwhile, back in New York, Evangeline's family and coworkers realize that she has disappeared, no one can locate her, and mysterious coffinlike boxes are being delivered to the television studio. Marks (The Wall) has written an electrifying modern tale of horror that pays homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. He goes much further, however, creating a hideous vampire more horrifying than anything that ever came from Stoker's imagination. Highly recommended for all fiction and horror collections.[See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/06.]-Patricia Altner, BiblioInfo.com, Columbia, MD

 

Baltimore Sun

1/27/07
TV bites: Literally, in former 60 Minutes producer John Marks' imaginative and bloody reworking of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Fangland. In a Stephen King-meets-Anderson Cooper cautionary tale, Marks takes his recently engaged and reluctant-to-leave-New York heroine, TV producer Evangeline Harker, to Romania to investigate and hopefully interview Ion Torgu, a Balkan crime king, for her TV news magazine, The Hour. (Not to be confused with 60 Minutes - much.) Along the way, creepy stuff happens, as it tends to do in Transylvania. Harker meets a young missionary who tells Harker some stories that chill her blood. Then comes the real blood when Harker unexpectedly meets up with Vlad - Torgu - the crime lord, who turns out to be far more of a villain than the reporter envisioned. But just when she discovers who Torgu might be, Harker finds herself trapped in a Hotel California situation. Meanwhile, back in New York, months have passed and Harker is officially MIA - causing great distress among her colleagues. But then - a sudden, seeming reappearance and recovery, and little coffins keep turning up at her office and people start getting sick, much as the missionary had described and ... Why spoil the fun? Marks melds the go-for-the-jugular world of TV news, keen knowledge of the Eastern bloc (the scenes in Romania are to die for) and a much-beloved supernatural tale for a nifty and engaging flourish (albeit more Salem's Lot bleak than Dracula moral tale) that provides a crisp 21st-century take on an old favorite. With teeth.