Canadian Writers Abroad

From Stephen King’s The Dead Zone to the popular nineties’ TV show The X Files, there is something about tales of the paranormal and tales of the police procedural that pair very nicely. Perhaps it’s that telescopic effect of a larger, almost cosmic mystery looming over the more corporeal concerns of the whodunit. Emily Weedon knows these tropes well and exploits them to entertaining effect in her new, gory, breezily written horror novel, Hemo Sapiens, offering up a sensual vampire story centred around a hardscrabble cop driven to collar the bad guy – or, in this case, the bad girl.

The hero here is Luke Stockton, a Toronto homicide detective working to find out who is draining the city’s most recent murder victims of their blood, even as his pregnant wife adopts some unconventional (to say the least) pre-natal treatments at a strange, creepy med-spa downtown. These two threads eventually braid together as Luke learns that the city is falling victim to a particular kind of female vampirism, one looking to exact a feminist revenge on its victims. He soon learns that what plagues his wife is not the typical trials of raging hormones during pregnancy, but something far more sinister. His investigation leads to the med-spa’s otherworldly proprietress, Cleo, the horror tradition’s very embodiment of the unhuman villain.

Weedon, who lived in Budapest for a year nearly a decade and a half ago, and exploits some of that experience in Hemo Sapiens, knows how to frame a growing sense of fright by lacing together the various threads of her story through expert pacing and shifting points of view. She also knows that a story of vampirism must be, at its core, a story of seduction, and Luke falls victim to that allure just as much as the murder victims he’s investigating do.

What lies at the heart of this mystery is nothing short of a full-on cult, one that threatens to take away everything that Luke holds dear. Bringing Cleo to trial culminates with a well-executed twist that finds Luke confronting his deepest passions and his worst fears. The novel ends by speculating that humans – that is to say, homo sapiens –  and their victory over other hominids in the great tournament of evolution, is perhaps the worst horror of all.

Weedon, using skills honed as a screenwriter, unfurls her tale with cinematic aplomb, bringing a grimy, noirish version of Toronto to life through evocative details that speak to a specific kind of 21^st-century urban decay. This novel’s message is clear: Sure, it’s the vampires who drain us, but don’t discount the greater rot that we’ve brought upon ourselves.  

Emily Weedon lived in Budapest, on the Buda side, in 2011, near the Opera House, where she began writing her first novel, Autokrator (Cormorant Books, 2024). While working for television, she travelled extensively in Europe before 2017. She later co-created the Web series, “Chateau Laurier,” for which she and her co-writer, Kent Staines, were awarded Best Writing in a Web Series at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2023. Having played Lucy in two separate productions of “Dracula,” and probably having checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library when growing up, Weedon was well prepared to write a novel about vampires. She lives in Toronto.

I started writing Autokrator in 2011, when I was a trailing spouse living in Budapest. I was a new mom, I was profoundly alone in a new country, with a partner who worked 14+ hours a day. The euphoria of living abroad and exploring a new culture gave way after a few months to feeling alienated, adrift, purposeless and driven mad by the daily grind of child rearing.
–Emily Weedon, “12 Places that Inspired Autokrator,” February 6, 2024.

Mark Sampson is the author of the horror novel Lowfield (Now or Never Publishing, 2025), plus seven other books. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

Further

• Dundurn Press.
• Emily Weedon; check out her blog, Rambles on Books and Writing.
• Autokrater by Emily Weedon at Cormorant Books (April 2024).
• Emily Weedon, Open Book Interview
  (April 29, 2024)
• Podcast interview at Canada Reads American Style (September 24, 2025).
• Lisa Timpf’s review of Autokrater for the Seaboard Review of Books (August 24, 2024) on Substack.
• The Miramichi Reader review of Autokrater by Alison Manley.
• Weedon was co-winner with co-writer Kent Staines of the 11th Canadian Screen Awards for Best Writing for the episode “An Unfortunate Turn of Events” in their Web Series Chateau Laurier.