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FANGLAND

Name: FANGLAND
Author: John Marks
ISBN: 1-59420-117-X

by John Marks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2007

A disappointment for horror fans; though Romania provides good, scary fun, the New York scenes are a mess.

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Dracula meets 60 Minutes in this portentous horror novel from a former 60 Minutes producer (War Torn, 2003, etc.).

The story begins with the recently engaged Evangeline Harker, an associate producer with the TV news show The Hour, arriving in Romania to check out Ion Torgu, reputed organized-crime boss of Eastern Europe, for a possible interview. In Bucharest, Evangeline meets another young American, Clemmie Spence, a purported missionary who actually works for an organization fighting Satanism. The women travel to Transylvania, where Evangeline meets Torgu; he drives her to a spooky hotel in the woods. More vampire than crime boss, he has round, hideously discolored teeth (not fangs), a serrated knife and two accomplices who have murdered a Norwegian cameraman; Evangeline will come upon Torgu drinking blood. She escapes and reunites with Clemmie, but by now, Evangeline has grown “a dark, new self,” which she appeases by slitting Clemmie’s throat and drinking her blood. So much for the Romanian segments; the story’s other half, overcrowded with characters, takes place in the offices of The Hour in New York, and is told through emails and journal entries of its employees. Torgu manages to infect the office. Editors sicken from a wasting disease; some staff members die; others display odd behavior. Allegiances shift in puzzling ways; a former friend of Evangeline becomes Torgu’s slave, while the lady herself (now back in New York) seems unsure whether to kill her fiancé or make love to him. Torgu makes his own appearance at the office as the scene dissolves into chaos.

A disappointment for horror fans; though Romania provides good, scary fun, the New York scenes are a mess.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2007

ISBN: 1-59420-117-X

Page Count: 385

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006

Categories:

FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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BUBBLEGUM

by Adam Levin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020

A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.

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The past isn’t even past—but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most.

Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn’t so shaggy. In fact, it’s a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or “cure,” a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin’s future—or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s—the technological advances we’ve become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You’d think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin’s hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, “short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze.” By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does—and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, “Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.” If Levin’s point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again.

A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.