The Gilda Stories
A girl escapes slavery in 1850, is made immortal, and watches two hundred and fifty years of America.
Gomez begins in 1850 with a girl escaping slavery in Louisiana who is taken in and made immortal, and follows her across two hundred and fifty years to a ruined future. Published in 1991, it put a Black lesbian vampire at the centre when almost nothing else did, and it treats immortality as a way to watch American history rather than as a curse. It won two Lambda awards and has aged extremely well.
Recommended by 1 Person
Grady Hendrix
This is a book with such a breadth of imagination that really shows you what can be done with vampires. For every heterosexual vampire novel — a broody male vampire transformed by the love of a young woman — you have something like John Peyton Cooke’s Out For Blood, which is a gay vampire story from the ’90s, or The Gilda Stories, which are gay non-white vampire stories… In 1991, it was very ahead of its time.
Interview · April 2025
As an Amazon Associate, bookstoread.org earns from qualifying purchases. Links to Amazon on this page may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Spotted an error on this page? Tell us and we will fix it.