Ever notice how little horror there is in most horror novels? Stephen King and Anne Rice both can creep me out, but Rice does it with the eroticism of her blood drinking scenes, and King does it by patiently launching me into the familiar, and but then reminding me of how frightening the familiar really is. At his best –Hearts in Atlantis, Carrie– it’s the familiar world (the sheer anger between Bobby and his single mother) that is most frightening.
Susan Hubbard’s Society of S is not a horror novel, though it is a vampire novel. Instead, it is a coming of age story, of a girl who also happens to be a vampire.
Every teenager at some point must have felt that she is a monster, or that members of her family are. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;–but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.
Ari’s relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it’s a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely, so we get the sense of sitting in on someone’s living room. It is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that Poe himself may have been a vampire.
The writing throughout is terse, but suggestive of a wider world, like some of the best young adult fiction. (This is a compliment. Good YA writing is usually terse but emotionally resonant, suggestive of detail rather than fully described. There is none of the "fat" I have learned to expect in vampire novels. Every novel I’ve read by King or Rice would have profited from an editor willing to consign half of it to the eternal hellfire of delete.)
After her best (and only) friend is killed and reanimated as a vampire (who her father sends back to the grave), Ari leaves home in shock and heads south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. When she has to defend herself on the road, she does so in a way that ends any question about her true nature.
The "Society of S" turns out to refer to one particular group of vampires, Sanguinists, who believe in living in harmony with humans. Her father is one such, and he lives on a blood substitute while he works on a biotech solution that will ease the craving. Tut the narrative suggests that there are many other sects, each with a different view of the proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers, including those who, like the vamps in Blade, believe that humans should be grown as chattel. Ari’s father has been working for a company trying to find a biotech solution to the need for blood; her mother, when she shows up, has been searching for a naturalpathic direction. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.
The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. That’s unfortunate. I came away from each chapter of Kostova’s compelling novel thinking, "Wow, this writer had a really good liberal arts education!" It’s a fully re-imagined tour-de-force reworking of the Dracula story. S has no such ambition. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling and Charlaine Harris’s first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark, in that it’s the story of slowly awakening to a sense of self-in-the-world. This is the novel of a young person discovering herself for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.
Though I enjoyed this novel, I wasn’t going to blog about it at first, because I didn’t see the connection to the Post-Human. At its core, as I said above, "it is a coming of age story, of a girl... vampire."
Think about that.
The coming of age plot is a quintessentially humanistic plot. But of a vampire? And what about having to survive on a biotech solution? Or viewing humanity as farm animals? These are questions of posthumanity, of rethinking the nature of "human nature," of relying on prosthetic blood, of facing questions of extended life verging on immortality. I was involved by the "humanity" of the writing –a young person learning about art, herself, and society-- that I overlooked these themes.
Having seen them, I now want to see how the writer will develop the "can’t we all get along?" questions that come up when it becomes clear that Ari and her family were separated by and are united against social forces about human/vampire. (Note: In an interview at Burried. com, the author said that she was already working on the sequel, which would develop darker political themes. I’ll be watching.)
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