My entry into this anthology is titled “The Calm of Despair” and it features the unnamed Whitby solicitor featured in Dracula.  I did a good deal of research about the language of flowers, Victorian society, and the proper use of telegram boys.

This story owes a debt to gentleman Jason Carl for our discussions about Whitby, the loan of his wonderful annotated Dracula, and various discussions.

Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker’s Dracula

One of the more admired characters in Western literature happens to be a murderer, a villain, a fiend: Count Dracula. Irish author Bram Stoker’s classic novel stands high in the canon of speculative fiction, influencing countless twentieth- and twenty-first-century storytellers in a variety of mediums. It is only natural for the outsiders of society to reinterpret the world’s most infamous vampire through the lenses of their own experience. Who is more outside of society than Dracula? Perhaps the writers of queer-themed speculative fiction and their characters….

In Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker’s Dracula, editor Steve Berman provides a worthy companion to Lethe Press’s widely acclaimed earlier anthologies of queered canon, A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe. Here you will find dark tales (and a poem) of Dracula himself, his minions willing and not, his implacable enemies, and their heirs. Prepare to be guided into the deep recesses of the queer imagination by an impressive array of award winners, veterans, and bright new lights.

Thirteen stories and a poem by: Jason Andrew / Laird Barron / Steve Berman / Seth Cadin / Traci Castleberry / Elka Cloke / William P. Coleman / Sven Davisson / Rajan Khanna / Livia Llewellyn / Ed Madden / Jeff Mann / Damon Shaw / Lee Thomas

You can find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Suffered-Night-Queering-Stokers-Dracula/dp/1590213998/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381786335&sr=1-1&keywords=suffered+from+the+night