The stories don’t just show us scenes from Gilda’s life, they build a bigger picture. Despite the title, as I read I became more and more convinced that this is a novel – a more coherent work than any novel-in-stories I think I have ever read. But to read them in context is something else altogether. (As the book was published in 1991, the way Gomez imagines 2020 is especially interesting! Once you get past the clunky technical details, the idea of people communicating with each other via private video channels is pretty prescient, as is the backdrop of increasing environmental decline.)Īs my initial reading of ‘Off-Broadway, 1971’ proves, the stories can be enjoyed individually. Yerba Buena (later known as San Francisco) in 1890 Missouri in 1921 Boston in 1955 New York in 19 plus two visions of the future, 20. Some years later, she is made into a vampire, and each story relates a segment of her long and fascinating life. The Gilda Stories introduces the title character as a slave girl in Louisiana, 1850. I read the story standing up in my kitchen, and ordered the book online before I’d even sat down that's how rapt I was.)

I was instantly spellbound, and bought The Gilda Stories as soon as I’d finished it. It includes a story from this book, ‘Off-Broadway, 1971’.

My first encounter with Gilda was by way of the 2015 anthology Ghost: 100 Stories to Read with the Lights On, edited by Louise Welsh. Lush prose, engaging episodic story, and masses to think about. It's all about being Black and queer in America, about blood and home soil, giving and taking about living in a greedy, exploitative, violent place and resisting those things. In the process she finds relationships (no less valid because they can't last) and slowly starts to build a found family. Gilda moves through the decades learning how to trust and finding a place in the world, but it's over a century before she can begin to confront her experience of slavery, and start overcoming the trauma. It may not be a voluntary exchange, of which she's aware, but it is still a form of payment and valuable, because demanding something for nothing and hurting people are in fact wrong. So she uses psychic vampire powers to identify problems and help: open horizons, give self worth, repair memories.

She's taken in by a vampire, who turns her with consent and care, and who teaches her the first lesson: you leave something of value in exchange for blood.

Gilda (as she becomes) starts off as an escaped slave, a little girl who's fled the cotton fields now her mother has died, leaving her family. I generally don't like vampire books for many many reasons, one of which is that the common trope of 'oh no, I am forced to be an exploitative predator, my trauma' makes me want to punch MCs in the fictional face.

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez