Hemo Sapiens: flipping the script on thriller victims
“I just don’t want to read another story about a dead girl in the woods” an acquiring editor once told me, when we were worked together. So many thrillers and mysteries depend on the grisly death and abandoned remains of a beautiful young girl, often left in the woods, horrifically murdered. Thrillers take us into murky worlds where evil preys upon the hapless and readers are left to wonder if wrongs will be righted. In many ways, a young, fragile girl is the very epitome of an innocent, fragile victim. The thriller has roots in Chivalry and Romance... even the most hard-boiled detective is a rough descendent of the knight whose duty is to “save” the maiden. Horror, of course, subverts this. Flawed knights give way to flawed priests, demons and apparitions and evil tends to win out. Maidens, once again, pay the price.
With Hemo Sapiens I wanted to re-examine victims and aggressors, shake up the typical thriller and age-old victim narratives. I wanted to break free from the stuffy, stifled Victorian sexuality and gender roles that fuel the vampire myth. I also wanted to do away with Christian iconography in vampirism to refocus on older ideas of sex, life and death. I used the lens of a couple about to be a family to peer into the horrors and anxieties of parenthood, of a fragile existence in a world full of dangers and dangerous forces that nip at loyalty, connection and mortality.
I wrote Hemo Sapiens to explore body horror with the built-in horrors of pregnancy, the ultimate body shape-shifting experience. I was inspired to blow up a big idea: “what if pregnancy cravings explained vampire blood lust?” We know pica is a condition some women can experience while expecting, which compels them to eat dirt to get the nutrients they need to continue their pregnancy. What if vampirism were a kind of pica? It’s this type of what-if that makes the pages flow when I am writing.
Besides relieving women from the victim role for a spell, I wrote Hemo Sapiens to explore some of the actual human evolution entwined with iron in our blood. Leonard Shlain’s fascinating nonfiction book Sex, Time, and Power and an enduring interest in anthropology add what I hope is an unexpected “sci” to my “fi”.
Joseph Campbell famously said “life lives on life”. We see this in animal chains, and in the casual way humans are willing to kill each other for resources... This is coded into my prose, wondering out loud about who is sheep, who is shepherd, who is farmer, who is crop? In Hemo Sapiens, powerful, and amoral women gorge on life, building new life, destroying life, flipping the script on victims, power, and intention.