I struggled with the pacing of this story which meant I lost interest halfway through. Unfortunately this one wasn’t for me.

I’m not a big fan of gothic or vampire literature but this is such an esteemed book in the lesbian canon, that I wanted to read it. And I’m very glad I did. I read the recently published version with the bright cover.

Gilda is a black, lesbian, vampire and the story takes us through decades of history as lived through her experiences. It is a dark book ~ how can it not be?~but it is also tender and funny and very, very well written.

Gilda is a vampire with a conscience so there is some true complexity in the storytelling and also a reflection of the black experience as ‘other’. The framing by Ms Gomez is very clever as you’re facing discomfort while being entertained.

I’m pleased I broke my trope/genre dislike to enjoy this gem.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley

Wanted to read these ever since I watched the documentary about Jewelle Gomez, the stories don't disappoint. Wonderfully written, these stories are fun, political and enjoyable. A perfectly obvious rewriting of the vampire myth from the refreshing perspective of a Black queer woman.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Gilda Stories is a unique and interesting take on the vampire genre, but it just didn't grab me as I expected.
The novel follows Gilda, a Black lesbian vampire, as she navigates two centuries of American history. Gilda is a complex and fascinating character, and I enjoyed reading about her journey of self-discovery and acceptance. The book also does a good job of exploring themes of race, sexuality, and identity.

However, I found the writing to be a bit dense at times, and the pacing was uneven. Some of the stories were more engaging than others, and I felt like the book could have been trimmed down a bit.
I enjoyed the take on the vampire trope used as a black American history lesson, and loved Gilda herself and the longing for surrounding herself with "family" and the guilt at making more vampires, but as I said, it did feel overlong.
I'm also loving the 2023 new cover of this book. It's far better than the old one, which looked like a made for TV movie!

A lush surprise of a book with as much darkness at its heart as tenderness. I love books that challenge my usual opinion of a theme/genre and as someone who doesn't generally find vampire books particularly appealing, I'm actually so glad I requested this because it's done just that! I was utterly engrossed by each character's story from the outset and it has such an emotional pull. The writing is fantastic and I could stare at that striking cover all day long. This is definitely my Halloween recommendation for this year.

Fab and lots of fun, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, great for October Halloween reads, get this added to your TBR.

It's an intriguing and fascinating story but somehow there's too much expectations, too much things used to classify it as a classic and a book that deals with otherness, queernes, blackness and a lot of -ness
All this -ness made me feel like I was reading a sort of mystery relic and I found it fascinating but also a bit confusing at time.
I liked the characters and the world building but I also felt a bit confused at time.
It's a good book and I think a lot of people will love it.
3.5 upped to 4
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

“We, too, have met few of Gilda’s recent friends. Let’s have a toast. To the family of friends we gather about us. May we live and love eternally!”

My thanks to Random House U.K. Vintage Classics for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Gilda Stories’ by Jewelle Gomez.

This novel was first published in 1991 and quickly was proclaimed a modern feminist classic due to its exploration of otherness, Blackness, community, and female love. It also is a radical reimagining of the vampire myth. Given that the narrative covers two hundred years, it is also considered an early example of Afrofuturism.

The story begins in Louisiana, 1850, as an unnamed girl escapes from slavery. She is taken in by Gilda and Bird, two mysterious women who are rumoured to be witches. They travel only at night, dress in men's clothing and seem to know others' innermost thoughts. It is quickly obvious that they are vampires. However, as they explain to the girl: ‘We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange.”

When the original Gilda decides that it is time to embrace the True Death, she offers the girl the opportunity to become a vampire. Her final request is that the she adopts the name Gilda, which she does. Bird, a Lakota woman, is a bit miffed when she realises this: “You for her? … Hundreds of years of knowledge and wit in exchange for a girl who hasn’t lived one lifetime yet.” Still, Bird and the new Gilda carry on and eventually become close.

From there on we dip into Gilda’s life at various times: 1890, 1921, 1955, 1971, 1981, 2020, and 2050. Along the way there are inevitable changes in her life. Bird leaves Gilda in 1890 to reconnect with her people. Gilda makes new connections with others of her kind creating a found family with whom she can be herself.

The world moves on and as usual in vampire tales, Gilda must regularly reinvent herself in order to cover for her eternal youthfulness, a situation that becomes increasingly more difficult in the modern world.

I wasn’t aware of this novel or Jewelle Gomez’s work before reading this. Over the years I have read a fair number of novels about vampires and found the philosophy that Gomez’s vampires lived by more appealing than the usual portrayal of vampires as predators.

The 2020 section was a little strange given that Jewelle Gomez was imagining what changes might have taken place thirty years in the future.

I also appreciated the novel’s depiction of the concept of found family, which in recent years has become a more common theme in both queer fiction as well as in writing where a protagonist feels an outsider yet seeks a connection with others of their ‘tribe’.

Overall, I found ‘The Gilda Stories’ extraordinary. Gomez’s writing was beautiful and thought provoking. I could appreciate why it is considered a modern classic.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

I really wanted to love this one as it sounded right up my alley. I love queer and I love vampire myths, but I just couldn’t enjoy this.

I think the way it was written didn’t agree with my brain - it was very confusing to me as the POVs constantly shifted without warning, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Maybe the layout on the e-book didn’t help, but I just couldn’t follow the story or characters.

DNF @ 11%

I enjoyed this so much more than I expected to. Vampire novels are not usually my thing but this gripped me from the start and I finished it within a day.

I found it really well written with lots of great characters, I always enjoy a good found family story.

The Gilda Stories is such a beautiful vampire story, it takes such a unique view of vampires and makes them part of the world, helping keep humanity in a state of balance. I loved it so much.

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

Why have I never seen / read this book before !
What a story , it's a joy and would make a perfect film or t.v series.
We follow Gilda and her ( ! ) life over 200 years and the changes that time brings.

The Gilda Stories is a perfect book for vampire lovers and it will blow you away. Firstly our protagonist is a queer black female female who is telling us her story throughout time with incredibly refreshing and hard hitting truths about history as we see it through a more raw and real lens. I was honestly in love with this book and the writing and I highly recommend and wish more people had heard about this.

This book was nothing like I was expecting in all of the best ways!

In this book we are following a Black lesbian vampire over the course of 200 years of her life as she escapes slavery and watches the world change but also stay the same.

I enjoyed the way that every chapter was a new snapshot into Gilda's life as we see the world changing and the ways that Gilda has adapted to those changes. This is a book that manages to be sweeping and epic whilst also being a slice of life kind of story.

This is a vampire story that felt unlike any that I had read before - and let me tell you, I LOVE me a vampire story! - and yet I could definitely see potential ways that it has influenced some of my favourite vampire stories as was as having been influenced by vampire stories that came before. It felt both fresh and familiar throughout.

This edition was definitely deepened by the introduction and author's note that bookend the story to contextualise the background for writing the story.

Highly recommend this book!

A jewel in the crown of vampiric fiction, and a trailblazing one at that. Jewelle Gomez, writing a queer black vampire protagonist in 1991, is truly a visionary within the Horror genre, and there is so much poignant meditation on past, present and future of American society, seen through the eyes of Gilda, her immortal protagonist. Without this new edition from Vintage, who I'm grateful to for the ARC, I would likely not have come across The Gilda Stories, and I am supremely glad they have decided to reissue it for a new wave of readers.

I loved The Gilda Stories when I first discovered this book and I am so pleased that it is receiving a new publication as so many people have never heard of it - a situation that needs to be changed! This edition comes with a foreword written by Gomez in 2015 which I hadn't read before which adds a wonderful insight to the origins of this story and I was particularly struck by the line "Each new decade brings reminders that the culture has not yet healed the wounds left from slavery and bigotry." This is, in a nutshell, the strength of The Gilda Stories. It is a story that is just as relevant now as when it was published and likely still will be in 2050, because that is the job of Gilda, to traverse each new decade and question the very notion of humanity in the process.


My review of the The Gilda Stories

𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘬𝘦.

This book was excellent. Sometimes you read something and think... how have I not already read this? Jewelle Gomez’s take on the lesbian vampire story is brilliant. After escaping slavery, Gilda is taken in by a two vampires who bring her into their way of life. Now the years roll out in front of her endlessly, her potential is infinite, but her life will be of a different kind. The novel follows her life from 1850 to 2050 as she searches for meaning and a home, exploring her relationships with those around her. I really liked the way the themes of the vampire story were used to tell what was more of an emotional and political story, following the experience of what it is to be black in America, vampire or not, to be a woman in American, vampire or not, and to see time pass and everything that goes along with that. There’s even a chapter set in 2020 (the book was written in 1991) which was fun to read, seeing which of her predictions came to pass. This was a very interesting and different story and I really enjoyed it.

This was quite a sombre look at Vampires- definitely a more mature and persuasive view of what it might really look like through the ages. I loved the historical settings and it was so refreshing not to have the sparkly mesmeric trope for once. I really liked this but it was quite slow. A book in the same vein that I also enjoyed is Fevre Dream by George R Martin. Many thanks to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

The Gilda Stories is a sweeping, timeless story full of magic and majesty. It is a darkly compelling vampire story set against glittering backdrops of decadence and delirium. Originally published in the UK in 1992, this is the first UK edition of the book in over 30 years.

You can tell this is a vampire classic, it is a vampire book that does so much with the fact it is about vampires, but also with race and queerness and community and how these can be explored through the vampire myth.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Thank you so much to the author - @vampyrevamp as well as Helia at @vintagebooks for allowing me this opportunity to have a first UK edition.

There is so much to love about about this book. The Black, queer representation. The love between the characters. The joy, positivity and agency that Gomez allows for characters living on the margins of society. The use of vampirism as an allegory on trauma and connection is a stroke of genius and allows a fabulous long-term view of society through the eyes of a single character.

The reason that all these wonderful elements don't warrant a higher rating from me is due to the writing. I found it clumsy in several ways, the way the narrative shifts from one POV to another is done' without any consistency, often within the same scene. It unmoors the narrative and the voices of the characters are not sufficiently distinct leaving everything messy and unclear. A similar thing happens with the setting where it can be difficult to distinguish place and time until something very obvious appears to identify them.

The potential for this novel was huge, with a truly fascinating and original concept of some wonderful imagery and turns of phrase but the execution sadly didn't allow it to be fully realised.

BRILLIANT! I am so glad this has been reissued, it is a groundbreaking part of the canon of SFF, I will be recommending to all fantasy fans and anyone looking for a vampire book.