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This short story originally appeared in Abyss & Apex #24, Fourth Quarter 2007.

International Association of Time Travelers: Members' Forum
Subforum: Europe--Twentieth Century--Second World War Page 263

Read the full story for free at Abyss & Apex or Tor.com.

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.

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.