Desmond (Desmond #1) in Queereaders

Oct 07, 2015 Robert Dunbar rated it it was ok

Shelves: reviews

Flames dance in the library fireplace as a couple of friends spend a gray afternoon in chatter, thumbing through autographed copies of Dracula and Queen of the Damned, while idly wondering whether Anne Rice might actually be a vampire ... like them. It’s a droll beginning to an excursion into the personal lives of the undead.

Why, they wonder, do all fictional vampires seem so humorless? Why do they all appear to need extensive psychoanalysis? As demonstrated in Desmond, real vampires are sane, w Flames dance in the library fireplace as a couple of friends spend a gray afternoon in chatter, thumbing through autographed copies of Dracula and Queen of the Damned, while idly wondering whether Anne Rice might actually be a vampire ... like them. It’s a droll beginning to an excursion into the personal lives of the undead.

Why, they wonder, do all fictional vampires seem so humorless? Why do they all appear to need extensive psychoanalysis? As demonstrated in Desmond, real vampires are sane, warm, charming folk. These bloodsuckers don’t kill, just sip a little here and there, and there’s none of that sleeping in coffins either. In fact, the title character leads an entirely normal existence, except for completely regenerating every forty years or so. It’s all distinctly Dorian Grayish.

Despite the fact that the gay vampire tale, which has evolved into a distinct subgenre, generally emphasizes the erotic aspect, Dietz never stoops to describing all that biting and sucking in graphic terms, though it’s clear his creatures of the night (unlike, say, Anne Rice’s creations) routinely achieve orgasm. Eternal youth, wealth, sex – so where’s the problem? The titular hero of Desmond has been lonely for a long time, a very long time, and through most of the book he reminisces about his doomed affairs of the heart. Time and again, he seems to have made the poorest imaginable choices.

“You may be a man who loves women, Roger Deland,” said Desmond softly, “but I know that I already love you for what you are.”

Don’t you just want to stake him across the head? It's a pleasant enough ramble, but the tone stays closer to Barbara Cartland than Bram Stoker, and notably lacking is anything remotely redolent of horror. From the tender passion of an English nobleman for his manservant, to French vampires cavorting in the bushes of the Luxembourg gardens, Desmond’s recollections don’t really add up to much beyond a series of plush vignettes replete with immortal longings and ardent embraces. A bit much, really. Even the settings seem overly art directed, the décor leaning heavily to “gilt torchères” and “ormolu girandoles.”

More quaint than eerie, Desmond recounts the tale of a shy, soulful man on a melancholy quest for romance. He just happens to be a vampire, and the one really scary element here is the thought that he’s been cruising the night for centuries and STILL hasn’t got a boyfriend. On the other hand, some fantasies can’t help but exert a certain appeal. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the time in the world? Not that it does our hero any good. He doesn’t seem to have learned much, and his relationships never work out. (“You may be a man who loves women…”) The ending finds the forlorn fiend back in that book-lined room with all his buddies and, apparently, that’s the point: friendship alone survives the ages… an oddly bittersweet message from a story about monsters. ...more

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May 13, 2010 Christy Stewart rated it did not like it

Shelves: bl, fantasy, romance, urban-fantasy, vampire, speculative-fiction, contemporary, paranormal, reviewed

The first, like, five pages were two dudes talking about how good of a writer Anne Rice is.

Anne Rice, you sneaky bitch.

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Mar 14, 2016 Andrew Peters added it

Shelves: gay-fantasy

This may not be the very first gay vampire novel; it was published in 1998, though the Author's note indicates he wrote it in the late 1980s. But it's certainly an early foray into the genre, many years before vampires captured the fascination of the MM romance community.

Sidenote: an earlier example would be Jeffrey McMahan's 1991 Vampires Anonymous, which I found wonderfully trashy and campy.

The story is a straight-forward (gaily forward?) adaptation of the Anne Rice formula: gothic setting, le ...more

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