The Gilda Stories

This is not your typical vampire story. While most vampire literature focuses on the sexy and the bloodthirsty, this book does so only subtly. It focuses more on the main character's search for self and relationship with other vampires and the world around her. Gilda is a benevolent black lesbian vampire, made in 1850, who travels across the country at various times through the present and future. The stories are vignettes that take place over a two-hundred-year span. At each stop, Gilda tries to build or integrate into a community of other vampires as well as the ordinary humans around her and struggles with whether it is worth the risk to bring someone else into the fold simply to help her with her own loneliness. I found the book to be very readable with great prose and subtle takes on racism, feminism, dominant culture, the environment, and sexuality. The book won two Lambda Literary Awards in 1991, for general lesbian literature and for lesbian sci fi/fantasy/horror (back when the sf/f/h category was separated into gay and lesbian).

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