Chagrin du Vampire Holds Up Honors for Poetry

And the good news continues. The call this time was from DRACULA BEYOND STOKER: MINA HARKER for stories that feel like they could be canon, but we also enjoy fun alternate takes and pastiche. Prequels, sequels, updates, divergent timelines — unleash your creative powers of darkness and show us something exciting. Not quite speaking to me yet but, a few bullet points down: Poetry will be considered, but is not necessarily sought (We are hoping to have an all poetry issue sometime in the future).

But now is now, and I did have a poem — this a reprint but that would be okay if, again a few bullet points down, “at least 10 years old.”

So, back to the annals: it happens such a poem does exist. The title, “Chagrin du Vampire,” about a Mina Harker for whom the destruction of Dracula did not halt the process that was turning her into a vampire — only slowed it. She married, had her son Quincy, all seemed well but blood was blood, and eventually fate was to catch up to her. Not that she wasn’t able to handle it with some aplomb, explaining to her husband why they must part and taking up a new life (unlife?) in France.

But fate catches up — she may be a vampire, but her son was still a normal human, with implications . . . well, that’s what the poem, originally published in Fall 2010 in STAR*LINE, is about. So off it went on June 5, and today as I write this, Sunday, the word came back: We’ve read Chagrin du Vampire and would love to include it in the MINA issue.