The Gilda Stories

The Gilda Stories is an elegant, sensual, and natural vampire fantasy. Time-traveling from Southern slavery in 1850 to environmental devastation 200 years later, Gilda is the quintessential outsider seeking community. Jewelle Gomez combines a natural flair for storyteller with an ability to weave tapestries of personality that grab the mind's imagination and won't let go. A memorable story, deftly told. The central character of this multiracial, feminist, lesbian vampire romance fantasy travels through time and leads multiple lives. Throughout her lives, Gilda is a woman of African descent with strong feminist traits and a sense of loyalty to her friends and family, both mortal and immortal. In her first life, she is a runaway slave in Louisiana in 1850, not yet a vampire, not yet named, who stabs a rapist/bounty hunter in self-defense. Rescued and adopted by Gilda, a vampire who runs a brothel, she soon becomes a vampire herself and adopts Gilda's name. Subsequent lives take Gilda to California in 1890, Missouri in 1921, Massachusetts in 1955, New York in 1981 where she does a stint as a cabaret singer, and into the future in New Hampshire in 2020 and up to the year 2050. Gomez provides an unusual twist to the erotic vampire novel.