Get Your War On photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou / jjtiziou.net Fangland By John Marks The Penguin Press, 385pp., $25.95 more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Torgu, on the other hand, is a real bloodsucker. He's also, somehow, the embodiment of every atrocity the world has known, "two million years of massacre in the form of a man." He mesmerizes his victims with a catalog of the sites of mass murder: "Thessalonika. Treblinka, Golgotha, Solferino, Lepanto." And, like so many of us, he wants desperately to be on television—specifically on The Hour.

Torgu does succeed in shipping himself to The Hour's office, but Marks never quite marries his Transylvanian vampire narrative and the slick New York newsroom storyline. To say nothing of Marks's other subjects: the events of September 11, the minutiae of television production, seemingly endless observations on the machinery of suffering and horror. Indeed, Marks stuffs so many ideas and concerns into the book, alternating among diary entries, email correspondences, therapy journals and good, old-fashioned third-person omniscience, that the considerable shivers it first arouses soon dissipate. The crepuscular yields to the merely miasmic. Ostensibly a meditation on the very nature of terror, Fangland increasingly forgets to terrify.