|
|
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New
York, where his Leave
it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela
Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a
museum curator at the University
of Delaware. A curator
for thirty-two years, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer
pleasure of it. He created the character
of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels.
Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond,
in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia is his
second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his
partner of 37 years and their two teenaged children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a
great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother is the President’s
last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at
Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
|
|
Desmond Beckwith is not a happy man. A financial wizard with an
international investment empire, he's also in love with his
lifelong-but-straight friend Roger. At forty-five, in spite of a circle
of supportive friends and an elegant New York townhouse full of
antiques, he feels isolated and cut off from humankind.
And
with good reason. Desmond Beckwith is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old
vampire. For nearly two centuries he has lived in New York, looking
vainly for love and seeking to satisfy his twin thirsts for blood and
sex in those places where men of his kind have always met to find
release and solace.
Into Desmond's sheltered, lonely world
stumbles Tony Chapman, an unemployed museum curator, down on his luck
and one step away from being out on the streets. Brutalized by the
unforgiving nature of New York City, Tony is on the edge of despair when
he meets this darkly handsome older man in the smoky dimness of a
Greenwich Village bar. To their mutual astonishment, Tony proceeds to
turn Desmond's protected little world on its head, and to unlock pieces
of Desmond's past lives and loves that were deeply buried in Desmond's
memory.
Available at Amazon!
|
Desmond Beckwith is back. He’s handsome, he’s rich, he’s gay.
And he’s looking for a house in Jersey.
Desmond,
you see, is a vampire. He has a job he loves; he can get blood whenever
he needs it. But he thinks he wants a family, and that can get
complicated when you’re nearly 300 years old and don’t know how to
drive.
Fourteen years after Ulysses Grant Dietz
(great-great-grandson of Ulysses S. Grant) published his popular first
novel, Desmond, the long-awaited sequel has appeared through Amazon
Kindle Books, under the banner of Lightbane Publications.
Vampire
in Suburbia picks up the story of Desmond Beckwith fifteen years after
events of the first book. In the wake of 9-11 he’s moved his financial
firm out of lower Manhattan and into a new office tower in downtown
Newark. As his current life cycle winds down and he regenerates once
more to the age of 21, the age when he first became a vampire in 1745,
Desmond needs to rebuild the life he had, a life that had become—for the
first time in centuries—filled with people who are important to him.
He yearns for something more than the opulent seclusion of his flat in
New York. Looking for a place to call home in the suburban greenbelt
outside of Newark, he revisits people and places from past lifetimes,
and meets a handsome bearded museum curator who stirs up emotions that
Desmond thought had been carefully packed away.
Desmond Beckwith
has always been an outsider. With the support of his friend of many
lifetimes, Roger Deland, Desmond has managed to maintain his privacy and
his fortune; but at the cost of meaningful human contact beyond the
blood he needs to survive. Desmond realizes, this time around, that
there’s got to be more to life than money, blood and anonymous sex.
And he hopes he’ll find it in suburbia.
Available at Amazon!
|
|
|
