I came across Peter Temayne’s perfect Dracula short story “Dracula’s Chair” in a collection called Coffins: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler. For a lover of Stoker’s Dracula, it is the perfect anthology. It contains stories by writers like Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and F. Paul Wilson.

Tremayne’s short-story is about a writer who is driving home from a holiday with his wife. She spots a chair in a window of an antique store and convinces her husband to turn the car around so that she can take a look at it. He immediately does not like the chair but his wife says is the perfect thing for a space in his office.

Once the ugly chair is home and installed in his office, he avoids it for a while, but is not quite sure why. Finally he decides to sit in it. To say more is to give too much away.

According to the website Fantastic Fiction, Paul Tremayne is the pseudonym for Peter Berresford Ellis, a well-known Celtic scholar and a literary biographer. Under the name Paul Tremayne he has also written dozens of “Popular Fiction” and over 100 short stories.

Besides “Dracula’s Chair” it looks like Tremayne has also written a book series called Dracula Lives. Readers of ClimbingSky can be sure that I will be looking to find and read that series in the months ahead.

I highly recommend the anthology Coffins: The Vampire Archives and especially Tremayne’s excellent short story.