The Gilda Stories

"The Gilda Stories have fallen a little out of fashion, but back in the 90s… man! They were assigned as much as Bastard Out of Carolina in gender studies courses, in women’s literature courses, in multicultural literature courses. It’s about a black woman who’s escaped slavery, who gets transformed into a vampire by another woman and becomes her lover. She, in turn, becomes a vampire who transforms other women into her lovers and into vampires. The book follows her life over the decades. It starts in the 19th century, and then it keeps going into contemporary times. But what I love is that it then keeps going into a near future world where vampires come out of the closet, so to speak, and become members of our society. What happens then? 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. Vampire stories can do anything. They can be about monsters, they can be about victims and victimizers; you can see them through the lens of a hetero romance, you can see them through the lens of a queer romance; you can see them through a non-white lens, you can see them through a colonial lens; you can see them in so many different ways. They can even, in one book, stretch across all those different relationships, all those different categories of sexuality, and even stretch into the future and become science fiction. You can go from historical fiction to contemporary horror fiction to science fiction, all in a single book. Yes. If people want to dip into vampirism further, I’ll just mention two of my favourite out-there vampire stories with a very different kind of vampire. First, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s short story “Luella Miller.” Wilkins Freeman was an enormous writer, a huge bestseller around the turn of the last century, who has been forgotten today. She wrote this short story about a psychic, emotional vampire. People around her just get more and more exhausted, and she asks them for more and more favours, until they finally wither and die. I think we’ve all had a friend like that. Then there is Richard Matheson’s 1951 short story, “Dress of White Silk.” I don’t think it’s even 1000 words long. It’s such a great child vampire story, which really shows you what can be done in such a small space of time. I’m waiting for my next big vampire book to come along right now. I feel like everything’s very much in the shadow of Twilight , so I’m waiting for someone to break some new ground soon…"