"One of the really good reads of the year...Any Stephenie Meyers fan would enjoy The Society of S."
--Charlaine Harris
THE SOCIETY OF S What if everything you knew about your family was a lie?
What if, when the lies began to crack, beneath them lay a truth so dark and deep, yet so compelling, that it pulled you inside?
Ariella Montero is seeking the true identities of her mother and father--and of herself. She's been taught literature, philosophy, science, and history, but she knows almost nothing about the real world and its complexities. Her world is one wherein ghosts and vampires commune with humans; Edgar Allan Poe and Jack Kerouac are role models; and every time a puzzle seems solved, its last piece changes the entire picture.
When the last piece is murder, Ari goes on the road in search of her mother, who disappeared at the time of her birth. The hunt nearly costs Ari her life, and, in finding her mother, she loses her father. But gradually she uncovers the secrets that have kept the family apart, and she begins to come to terms with her own nature and its chances for survival.
Set in upstate New York, England, and the American South, The Society of S explodes stereotypes--of the homeschooled, vampires, monkeys, FBI agents, and academics. In this strange new world, vegetarianism, environmentalism, biomedical research, and the abiity to disappear are options for those who drink blood and face the prospect of eternal life.
A taut, character-driven literary mystery, The Society of S is the future of vampirism, told in a voice that will haunt you-and make you think.
/> Audio version of THE SOCIETY OF S available at www.tantor.com Book club info.: http://www.readerscircle.orgREVIEWS:
BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB review: "Since Anne Rice has hung up her cape and stopped writing vampire novels, we were in the market for something new (but different). We never expected, however, to find something as engrossing as debut novelist Susan Hubbard’s The Society of S, which, to us, is more like accomplished Anita Shreve mixed with an early Anne Rice.
"Thirteen-year-old Ari is like most teenagers: awkward, confused, and curious. Her single father, Raphael, tries to shelter her from the world, but as Ari makes new friends for the first time, she discovers that her family is unlike any other—and that she may not even be fully human. As she pries open the doors of her family’s history, she realizes that her father is a vampire and that her mother may still be alive. As she sets out on the road to find answers, she’s stalked by a sinister force from her father’s past. Unlike anything else in vampire fiction, The Society of S explodes the stereotypes of vampires in a very literary, character-driven mystery. This is a story told in a beautiful new voice that will entrance and haunt you, all while making you think."
FT. MYERS NEWS-PRESS review: Author blows the lid off the stereotypical vampire
'The Society of S' A sheltered child embarks on a quest to Florida to find her mother, who is a vampire.
By Jay McDonald Special to news-press.com Originally posted on May 27, 2007
Where do discriminating vampires go to avoid the media frenzy and overblown stereotypes that tend to understandably exclude them from car pools and bake sales?
Homosassa Springs, Fla., of course. It's got everything the well-traveled "Sanguinist" might want, including fresh oysters to fight those midnight cravings and Green Cross home hemoglobin delivery as an alternative to gnawing on the neighbors.
Welcome to "The Society of S" (Simon & Schuster, $25), the year's most intriguing fiction debut to date. Author Susan Hubbard, an English professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, manages to so skillfully combine a young girl's coming-of-age story, an epic quest and a major overhaul of the hoary old vampire legend that one can't help but bite right into it.
We join Ariella Montero, a sheltered only child who lives with her father in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on the cusp of more than puberty; to her shock and growing fascination, Ari has just discovered that her handsome scientist father is a vampire, which naturally makes her at least half of one. To learn more about her lineage, she embarks on a quest to find her mother, now living among Sanguinists in Homosassa Springs (say that three times real fast!).
But set aside everything you've seen and read about fangs, from Stoker to Rice to Buffy. Hubbard's vampires, though locked in the same precarious immortal state, are enlightened, erudite intellectuals who quote Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Edgar Allan Poe ("he's one of us") and battle to retain a nagging moral residue from their human days. Over glasses of Picardo, the undead debate the ethics of dining on human donors verses developing, as Ari's father does, "environmentally friendly" synthetic blood.
Sanguinists (the S in "Society of S") tend to gather in locales with S-heavy names, the more the merrier: Saratoga Springs, Savannah, Homosassa Springs. Presumably Mississippi is thick with them.
Hubbard, a highly regarded literary writer with two prize-winning short story collections to her credit, braced herself for the perils of writing a "vampire book."
"Certain colleagues, when they heard what the book was about, sort of gave me a look," she admits. "I'm fully aware that some people will typecast me, but I think that anybody who reads the book will appreciate it as something that is not genre."
In fact, Hubbard tends to forego the fangs and reconnect instead with the psychological duality that Robert Louis Stevenson explored in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
"I'm going to be curious where bookstores put it," she says. "I think some who have read Anne Rice and books like that are going to be disappointed because there isn't enough blood and gore. I'm not salacious about the biting part. I wanted to keep it in a subtle vein." (Subtle pun unintended.)
Although Ari shares the author's alienated adolescence and a few of her quirks — both dream crossword puzzles and "seeing" letters and words in colors, a condition called synesthesia — Hubbard says the similarities stop there.
"Yeah, I'm a vampire!" she chuckles. "My father was gorgeous in his own way, but in a very mortal way."
A sequel is already under way, focusing on Ari's further adventures with her mother in a Homosassa Springs you won't find in any Fodor's guide.
THE SOCIETY OF S