Does anyone know what these marks mean above a word in print?
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I just recently ran into this myself a couple weeks ago! It marks emphasis on those particular mora/words/whatever they are marking.
Emphasis mark - Wikipedia
Emphasis Dots | Japanese with Anime
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Ah that is exactly it. So it’s almost like italics or underlining in English.
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Basically, yep! That second link I posted also includes a bit more detail about why certain things might be marked, (could be a deliberate misspelling for wordplay, for example) and how the different shapes used as markers might have slightly different meanings, but ultimately, it’s just a case of emphasizing something for whatever reason the author may have, which context should usually provide. 
Yeah, basically, bold and italics doesn’t really work on kanji (it makes it hard to read). So dakuten is the system they use instead.
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This book is fairly satirical so it would not surprise me if there were some clever meaning here. I’ll have to be on the lookout because it’s easy for me to miss those sorts of things.
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Or interpuncts. You’ll see those too.
I like to think of it as punctuated. for. emphasis.
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