It was a remarkable technological breakthrough, except for the pesky fact that it was a massive fraud. A coterie of savvy investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars, but on the bright side, the victims included Henry Kissinger and Betsy DeVos.

Theranos would probably have collapsed under the weight of its own chicanery, though recent political events suggest how long even the most ludicrous mass deceptions can stay afloat on the wind of a very stable genius. But Holmes was rushed to ruin by the tenacious reporting of John Carreyrou in the Wall Street Journal. And in 2018, he published an excoriating book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” which laid out the whole sorry story of gobsmacking duplicity.

Now, in a heartbeat, comes a weird companion novel of sorts called “Sucker,” by Daniel Hornsby. Released just as Holmes begins the second month of her 11-year sentence in federal prison, this is not so much a roman à clef as a roman avec des dents: Hornsby retells the bloody story of Elizabeth Holmes as a vampire spoof.

As metaphors go, this is, admittedly, not too original. Plenty of commentators have remarked on Holmes’s hypnotic powers of persuasion, her pale visage, her preternatural youth and, of course, her company’s vampiric thirst for blood. But Hornsby brings a sharp wit to this worn crypt. “Sucker” highlights the “Twilight” in “The Twilight Zone” to create a caustic satire of obscene wealth.

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Narrator Chuck Grossheart is the self-loathing scion of a loathsome American dynasty. He introduces himself as the “black sheep in a family of twenty-four-karat fleeces.” His billionaire father is a Lex Luthor wannabe whose multinational empire has wrecked the climate, armed dictators and killed off “roughly an eighth of our planet’s fauna.”

A user of many intoxicants, Grossheart is particularly addicted to one: wordplay. “The chambers of my gross heart,” he says, “were mostly vaults and dungeons.” Still, driven by some regressive gene of good conscience, he’s broken away from the family, taken a vow of (faux) poverty and started his own punk music label called Obnoxious Records. “I was to be a Peggy Guggenheim of independent, difficult music,” he says. “I could redeem myself by looking after all these dumb, insolvent artists.” His company’s latest album is called “Sucker,” a pun that swooshes around this novel like a bat in the belfry.

None of Chuck’s artists, not even his girlfriend, know he’s connected to one of the world’s most evil families, but he needs Dad’s cash to keep the label afloat. Fortunately, just as Obnoxious teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, Chuck gets a call from a brilliant old Harvard friend named Olivia Watts. Known as “Steve Jobs, but with a heart,” Olivia has founded Kenosis, which promises to revolutionize medical testing and “cure mortality.” With a great cloud of flattery, she tells Chuck that she needs him to be her “creative consultant and special adviser on ethics.” He knows she’s using him to get his father to invest in Kenosis, but he also knows that working for Olivia Watts will impress his old man and get the moola flowing again. All Chuck has to do is keep his anti-capitalist punk musicians from catching on.

Silicon Valley’s shamans and charlatans regularly speak with such an astonishing blend of vanity, inanity and obliviousness that there isn’t much left for an enterprising satirist to add, but Hornsby’s descriptions frequently draw blood. Olivia has designed the Kenosis headquarters with “an archway lifted from some church in Bavaria” to “inspire cathedral levels of wonder in all who beheld her domain.” The halls are festooned with vacuous precepts, like “Don’t just think outside of the box. Live outside of it.” A corporate retreat featuring spoken-word poets is particularly funny. And listening to Olivia’s spiel to potential investors, Chuck says, “She looked like Joan of Arc if the martyr had traded her saintly steed for a private-capital-fed unicorn.” At the end of the presentation, delivered in her “vaguely Canadian pseudo-accent pitched down a step or two,” Olivia concludes modestly, “While I’m always vigilant against exaggerated claims, there’s no denying that this is the future of medicine.”

Knowing that Olivia “seems to just bend reality around her like it’s taffy,” Chuck harbors some reservations about her sincerity. The way her voice catches at exactly the same point in every perfectly replicated presentation is either touching or troubling. But what really alarms him is stumbling upon a forbidden floor in the headquarters that’s filled with “piles and piles of bags of blood.” And he can’t shake the sense that he’s being followed. And his lead singer has gone missing …

As “Sucker” swells toward its spooky climax, the old vampire tropes begin to swarm. But this isn’t really a thriller so much as an IV pole on which Hornsby can hang a steady drip of mordant commentary on punk music, Silicon Valley and the corrosive effects of dynastic wealth. No matter the fangs or the fury, Hornsby never forgets he’s writing a comic novel inspired by one of the 21st century’s greatest swindlers. What really keeps “Sucker” airborne, though, is how it spreads its wings to embrace the whole nefarious network of super-rich fiends who hang in the shadows and drain ordinary people dry.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.