The back story of the meat-pie baker

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This article was published 06/05/2025 (326 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When it comes to his novels, horror author David Demchuk’s output is a bit of a zig-zag.

His first book, The Bone Mother (2017) took us on a tour through a menagerie of monsters tied into the Slavic mythology of Ukraine and Romania. It was nominated for the Giller Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award.

The monster in his followup, Red X (2021), though supernatural, was untethered from established myth, inspired by a real-life serial killer who stalked Toronto’s gay village. Interspersed with the horror was a good deal of autobiographical content, describing, among other things, the Winnipeg-born Demchuk’s migration to Toronto in the mid-’80s.

Demchuk’s new book, The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett (Hell’s Hundred, 432 pages), written in collaboration with Canadian author Corinne Leigh Clark, returns to the realm of legend. It’s an ambitious telling of the story of Mrs. Lovett, the fabled Victorian-era murderess who aided London serial killer Sweeney Todd in the disposal of his victims’ bodies by baking their remains into pies.

While Mrs. Lovett and Todd were almost certainly fictions, the product of 19th-century penny dreadfuls — cheap, sensational serial publications — the book adds a dimension of reality that is more sympathetic to the Lovett character, at least more than the character in playwright Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical interpretation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (Patti LuPone, who played the role in a 2000 production, said she felt Mrs. Lovett was the true villain of the story.)

In fact, Demchuk — also a notable playwright — got the ball rolling on the book in December 2021, a month after Sondheim died.

“I first mentioned the project to my agent, Barbara Berson, and indicated to her that I would need another writer with greater knowledge of the time and place to partner with me to complete the book on a reasonable timeline,” Demchuk says in an email interview from his home in St. John’s, N.L, where he lives with his husband.

“Corinne was another client of Barbara’s who was remarkably well suited for the project. By Christmas we had agreed to work together and began in earnest in January 2022.”

The book hardly seems like the product of two authors. One can detect no demarcation anywhere in the book’s narrative, which largely takes the form of letters from one “Margaret C. Evans” to investigative newspaper reporter Emily Gibson.

Demchuk, who turns 63 next month, says the collaboration was a happy conjunction of expertises.

“I was familiar with some of the stage melodramas, sensation novels and penny dreadfuls of the era, so I began to develop the plot and the structure with those as the inspiration,” he says.

“Corinne was less experienced than I was at plot and structure and form, but had studied in London and worked in theatre there for a while, primarily on sets and costumes, which meant that she had literal hands-on experience with the look and feel of Victorian England. She also has a great love of all things Gothic, and had considerable historical knowledge and access to research materials.”

To start, Demchuk gave Clark some preliminary research and writing assignments, such as developing some of the secondary characters. With that groundwork, the two were able to adapt and meld their writing styles to create a unified voice.

“I think we were both amazed at how quickly it came together from there. It was very much a 50/50 partnership — I think by the end there wasn’t a word left that we hadn’t both touched in one way or another,” Demchuk says.

The book offers a more fleshed-out interpretation of Mrs. Lovett, the result of careful consideration between the authors.

“Our key question going into the project was: even considering how grim the Victorian era was for working-class people in general and women in particular, what happened to this particular woman that led her to assist her murderous associate by grinding and baking his victims into pies?”

Demchuk will be signing copies of The Butcher’s Daughter on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Raven’s End Books in St. James.

“Twelve-year-old me would never have believed that Winnipeg would have a bookstore focused on horror, and that I would one day be signing my novel there,” he says.

“And yet I think Winnipeg has always been a strong supporter of horror, in film and in print and on other platforms. I think the genre is more popular than ever, thanks to our worldwide anxieties over just about everything.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com