Before I get into 'The Gilda Stories', I have to ask whether a 1991 novel can truly count as a classic? Without even looking at what it is, it feels like an odd choice for Penguin, especially given the age of the other books released in this 'Speculative Fiction Special' series. Last month, I reviewed 'The Vampyre' and 'Carmilla', which were originally released in 1819 and 1872. Next up is 'Dracula' from 1897, so they're focusing on the 18th century and then skipping over literally generations of titles.

Are we going to fill in later with the Penny Dreadfuls, Victorian ghost stories, cosmic horror, fears of the radium age, the serial killer era, the short stories of the fifties, the black magic throwbacks, the blockbusters of the seventies and modernisation under King and Herbert, the excesses of the nasties of the eighties, the new romanticism of Anne Rice, the literary horror or dark fantasies of Clive Barker and the splatterpunk of Skipp and Spector? Some of those seem like classics but much of it feels much too new to get associated with a word like that.

But Penguin chose this, so let's take a look. Jewelle Gomez slipped past me in 1991, a time when I was avidly devouring horror, but then this is rarely horror, even if it's about vampires. It seems far easier to see this as fantasy and eventually perhaps even science fiction, given that it takes Gilda from 1850 to 2050. It seems to be traditionally classified as a novel rather than a linked short story collection, but each chapter is its own story set in its own time and place. Two of these were future when the book was published, though 2020 has now become the past. I guess speculative fiction is as good a label as any for something so unique.

And this is unique in many ways, beyond everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It tells of a vampire, who starts out without a name but acquires one at the end of the first chapter that serves as well as any. It's 1850 here and she's an escaped slave from a Mississippi plantation, who's found by a vampire named Gilda. She comes of age in a Louisiana brothel, not as a prostitute but a sort of housekeeper or maid. She shows an aptitude for learning, studying languages with Bird, a Lakota woman, also a vampire, and Gilda's last act before committing suicide by sun is to turn her so that Bird will have a companion. She also takes the name of Gilda and she's the title character.

As that might suggest, it's very much a character study at this point rather than a traditional plot-driven story. There's certainly depth to be found, the sense of place and time already notable. It's the south and war is coming. When we skip forward forty years and sideways to California, it's the technology that's changing, with electricity the new imminent danger. We know little about Gilda in between 1850 and 1890 and it seems that she's still naïve about her own kind. She's enjoying the company of Sorel and Anthony, who maintain a fashionable salon, but Eleanor is something new: a vampire who doesn't follow the rules.

Then again, Gomez isn't following the rules. She's created a new type of vampire, which is always a plus, but she doesn't tell us the things we tend to expect to know. How does vampire society work? What's its hierarchy and structure? Which of the rules we've been handed down by 'Dracula' apply here? What harms vampires and what kills them? How do they stay hidden from the rest of society that would presumably see them as a threat? Most of these questions remain unanswered at the end of the book, but Gomez does speak to a few, over time.

Gilda's meeting the sun is one, so there these vampires do at least one traditional weakness. The others either don't seem to apply or simply never come up. They have psychic powers that help in a number of ways, a sort of telepathic method of communication being one, but the most obvious is tied to tradition. They feed on blood but when they do, they plant ideas into the minds of their victims that improve them subtly, maybe move them past a character problem. This is also how a predator species stays hidden, by always giving something back to their victims, so that they feel better after they've been fed on rather than worse. I like that.

What seems like a stretch is how Gilda seems to take all this for granted, asking few questions as she survives, hidden but apparently unaging—that benefit is kind of a given in a novel that spans a couple of hundred years—and learning very little. She's skeptical forty years into her time as a vampire when Sorel and Anthony warn her about Eleanor, a vampire who likes to manipulate and kill in the sort of ways we're used to traditional vampires following. She doesn't fall for it but that lesson appears to serve as the entire reason for the second chapter.

This is therefore incredibly passive, not just as a vampire novel but for a novel led by an escaped slave who we're told killed a man during her flight from the plantation. During the third chapter, set in 1921 in Rosebud, Missouri, she hangs out with the young widow of a minister and even does dishes to help out. When was the last time I read about a vampire doing dishes? I think, never. It's really a chapter about racism, showing how far American society has progressed since the days of slavery she remembers so well but also how the problem has not yet gone away.

And so we go: a beautician's shop in Boston in 1955, off Broadway in 1971, towards the future, the final chapter unfolding in the post-apocalyptic 'Land of Enchantment' in 2050, in a land shaped by environmental collapse. The only constant is change, Gilda moving from place to place every once in a while so her lack of aging doesn't become conspicuous, taking on new jobs that interest her, a welcome theme I haven't seen often enough in vampire fiction. If you have eternity, what hobbies will you explore? Gilda becomes a stage manager off Broadway in one time, a romance novelist in another, under a pseudonym of course.

Another angle that I haven't seen this early is the idea that feeding off people who are sick or on drugs is dangerous. That's something that comes up quite often nowadays, V. Castro's 'Immortal Pleasures' springing quickly to mind as another example that follows a female vampire through a long changing period of time. Here, that's a big deal in New York in 1971 and I wonder if it counts as the originator of this idea. I can't think of an earlier example, though I've often seen examples of vampirism being a metaphor for addiction.

Many seem to focus on the fact that Gilda is both black and lesbian, but Gomez doesn't see either as a particularly huge deal. She certainly explores racism often, especially in the earlier chapters from Louisiana to Missouri, but mostly from the perspective of progress. In 1850, war is coming to deal with the concept of slavery. In 1921, Rosebud is effectively segregated between a white side and a black side, while racist thugs are an active threat. By 1971, blacks are completely accepted, at least in the theatre world of New York. It's not until 1981 that sex even comes up. I'd seen Gilda as asexual until that point, but she falls for Effie on the Riverside.

Maybe the reason 'The Gilda Stories' slipped past me in 1991 was because it stands unique among the genres and trends of the day. It's notable for having a black lesbian vampire lead, sure, but it counts as notable far more for not following the same path that other vampire novelists were on back then. This is historical, but it's not as romantic as Anne Rice or as deliberately immersive as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It looks deeply at society but not by making vampirism legal like Laurell K. Hamilton. It's not urban like Tanya Huff or Nancy A. Collins. It's multi-genre but still unlike Brian Lumley or Fred Saberhagen. And it's fundamentally passive, unlike every other author out there.

In short, I found it fascinating, as a student of the genre. It's clearly become influential over time but that influence seems to have taken a while to be felt. Even now, when others have taken what Gomez wrote and run with it, it still stands on its own, which is incredibly rare and valuable. I may need to come back to this one in a decade or so and see how it plays a second time. I'm thankful it manifested now under this Penguin series, even if I'll still grumble about a 1991 novel, whatever it is, being classified as a classic alongside books from the 19th century. ~~ Hal C F Astell