Hemo Sapiens by Emily Weedon
These women are out for blood.
Hemo Sapiens is a spicy cocktail of horror, eroticism, and feminism with a real bite – perhaps a Bloody Mary with real blood substituted for the tomato juice. Or, as the author colourfully puts it in her foreword, “a sort of vagina dentata on wheels.” The protagonist is Luke Stockton, a straight-arrow detective who, as the plot proceeds, can’t figure out what’s going on his life – as his pregnant wife Beatrice acts more and more strangely -- let alone solve a series of bizarre murders in which young men are found drained of blood. Eventually, he stumbles into a ritual held by a secret society of tall, sexy women with exceptional strength and intelligence, hemo sapiens (which one might translate as wise blood), an apex predator species. They treat regular ol’ homo sapiens as a food source. They are happy to inform Luke that they are the next stage in human evolution; regular people are just so yesterday, although they do appreciate the sacrifices made by their victims.
“Blood binds us, the same colour running under the skin of all who live,” she writes. So does erotic attraction. Weedon brings out the sensuality of her characters effectively, stirring up a hot romance/horror blend: “The thought of silver stubble studding the cliff of his jaw made her ache and sent shimmers of want from her gullet through her spine straight down between her legs. She was pinned to a moment in time by the clear grey of his eye under an arched brow.”
I recall the late Canadian film critic Robin Wood writing that the true source of horror was the family; for Weedon, it seems to be the body. Weedon writes that her inspiration for this unusual story was both experiencing sometimes monstrous cravings during pregnancy, and her desire to update the vampire genre: “I wanted to replace the Judeo-Christian and Victorian mores with updated ones, to peer through the lens of science and to play with the idea that we Homo sapiens are not the only hominids and that we are at base in our nature capable of great horror and capable of great led-by-the-nose sheep-ishness. Gone are the dusty, quaint velvet clad vampires with their crosses and coffins,” she writes.
She’s also set it in contemporary Toronto, rather than Central Europe, where everyone speaks with a Bela Lugosi accent; I recognize the “Olympic Diner” where Luke likes to hang out as the Vesta Lunch at the corner of Bathurst and Dupont.
Emily Weedon’s screenwriting experience has taught her to keep the action moving swiftly, the dialogue crisp, and to use chapter breaks to shift the point of view between Luke and other characters. In fact, the novel would, not surprisingly, translate well into a sleek yet shocking film.
It was getting grim for a while, with seemingly no way out for Luke, and marriage either… but there is a happy ending – with a few secrets left untold.
My only question about this generally well-plotted, twisty and sometimes sardonic adventure concern a couple of minor characters who don’t seem to add much to the action. One is Lauren, a podcaster and amateur forensic anthropologist who never completed her studies. There’s a satirical aspect to her willingness to go to extremes in building her online audience… but the clandestine autopsy she conducts online in a rented storage shed feels like overkill. The other character I question is “Renaud,” a Québécois mercenary who suffers head trauma while trying to find his employers somewhere in Central Europe. For most of the plot, he’s in a coma and unconnected to the other characters. The author conveys this state well, but what does he bring to the storytelling table? Well, he does bring himself, involuntarily, but I won’t ruin the ending for you by saying what, exactly.
I look forward to the next wild ride Emily Weedon offers her readers… and possibly to the movie or TV series this one inspires.
About the Author
Emily A. Weedon is the CSA award-winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.
About the Reviewer
John Oughton lives in Toronto and has retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College in Toronto. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions), the mystery novel Death by Triangulation, and over 400 articles, reviews, and interviews. John’s studies include an MA in English Literature, where his teachers included Irving Layton, Frank Davey, Eli Mandel and Miriam Waddington, and non-credit courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs and Robert Duncan. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash Poetry Group. He is also a photographer and guitar player. https://joughton.wixsite.com/author
Book Details
Publisher : Dundurn Press
Publication date : Sept. 30 2025
Language : English
Print length : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 1459755677
ISBN-13 : 978-1459755673