There is so much back-biting and discord among those who compete for coveted time slots in each week's show, and to make their story "The Story" of the week, that the work place is referred to as "Fangland". They are past masters of manipulating reality so that it becomes good TV, and in the end the story is secondary. Torgu's offer of the most sensational stories ever told — the individual story of every person who died in any of the twentieth centuries horrors — is like raw meat to a shark, but also shows us how far removed the world of television news is from the realities of the world.
Torgu isn't the vampire in this book, even thought he drinks blood by the bucketful. The vampires are those who are waiting and wanting to feed upon the stories of the dead that he can offer them. Fangland is a biting satire of the world of network news shows, that makes use of Bram Stoker's Dracula story to emphasize how removed the stories that appear on our television screens are from the real horrors that exist in our world.
John Marks has created a world full of people who can't see beyond the artificial sets their interviews take place on and even when the real world intrudes in the shape of incalculable horrors they can only see it in terms of their own reality. Vampires steal the life blood of other creatures to continue their own existence - television news presents stories that have had their life blood drained from them, and both create a form of life that is neither living or dead.
Article comments