It’s a bit hard to categorize the Society of S, something the author Susan Hubbard is glad of. As she said during our interview: “I’m not a genre writer. I like creating characters and then putting them at odds with their environment…The day that I write what I think is a genre book is the day that I think I better be doing something else.”
Society of S might be marketed as a coming-of-age story or as a vampire novel, but I’d say that it’s both, and more. It achieves what the horror genre is supposed to achieve, and has in the past with stories like Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Stoker’s Dracula. As in those books, the supernatural in The Society of S is used to ask essential questions about identity, philosophy and the monster that might lurk inside all of us.
Even though it does touch on those monsters, the novel is somehow positive about humanity (and vampires) in a way that most vampire novels aren’t, though it does have suitably dark moments. The characters will catch you, particularly the narrator, young Ari, who goes questing for her long-missing mother after discovering her half-vampiric heritage.
For southerners and Floridians, Hubbard has included richly wrought settings informed by the reality of Sarasota, Homosassa Springs and Savannah.
If you’re of the literary and philosophical bent, Hubbard has packed plenty of literary and philosophical references into the book, as Ari is educated by her brilliant father on the finer points of Edgar Allen Poe, among other things.
Hubbard is busily working on the sequel to The Society of S, even though she hadn’t intended to write a sequel when she first wrote the book. As she’s gone back and read the novel, she’s found “plenty of unanswered questions and mysteries”, some of which she’ll answer in the sequel. She’s also currently on the book tour for The Society of S, and will soon be coming to Jacksonville.
EU: The majority of your vampires are actually pretty nice people, which is really unusual in a novel about vampires. Why did you choose to do that?
Hubbard: [In literature] they’re sometimes demonic and downright evil. That’s why “vampire” has such awful connotations…Part of my contrarism was to envision the vampire as the good guy…It made perfect sense to me that they were just misunderstood people suffering from certain afflictions, some of them anyway, the Sanguinsts, and there are, of course, the others that just delight in mortifying mortals.
EU: How long did it take you to write the book? What was the inspiration?
Hubbard: I was able to write it within a year. It began with a dream that I had about a woman walking in Savannah, but what was strong about the dream was the narrative voice…When I woke up, I wrote it down…There’s something about the voice that I really enjoyed, and that’s where a lot of my fiction has come from in the past, just this narrative voice. It’s not my voice that comes to me, usually in a dream. So that became the preface of the book, and very soon after writing the preface I got a sense of what the whole could be…in other books that hasn’t happened, but I was able to write a detailed outline of the whole…I spent all of last summer writing for at least three hours most days.
EU: Identity is a definite focus for your book. How would you say that relates to vampires?
Hubbard: [I want to] talk about what it is to be “other” and to be alienated from the culture. I certainly identify with that; I think a lot of people do, frankly. What is it like to live in culture whose values don’t reflect yours? It makes you feel constantly displaced and constantly as if you’re the outsider. That matters to me and it’s something I think I’m taking further in the next book.
Susan Hubbard will be signing The Society of S at the Jacksonville Beach Books-a-Million on May 17th at 7 pm.
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