20 greatest works of fiction about New Orleans

The Gilda Stories (Cover image via City Lights Publishers)

5. The Gilda Stories

New Orleans apparently has enough room for a plethora of bloodsuckers, if we are to imagine that Louis and Lestat exist alongside the protagonist of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. But where Anne Rice’s creations are pale, languid aristocrats of the night, Gomez has created something entirely different.

For one, the central pair in The Gilda Stories are both queer black women — a far sight more diverse than anything in the whole of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Furthermore, Gomez goes from Gothic horror to fantasy to speculative fiction over the course of this book. It’s a fascinating ride.

The story begins with a young woman, running away from slavery in the 1850s. She ends up at a brothel in New Orleans. However, this is no ordinary Storyville haunt, but a brothel full of the undead. Instead of taking a cheesy horror movie turn, however, the vampiric sex workers take the young girl into their family. She develops a special relationship with Gilda, the brothel’s madam.

Eventually, the girl becomes a vampire herself and takes on her quasi-mother’s name. The book then follows this new Gilda through the next 200 years. She spends time in California during the 1890s, Missouri in 1921, Massachusetts in the 1950s, New York in the 1980s and New Hampshire in 2020. At one point, she even moves through the “Land of Enchantment” in 2050.

All throughout the course, Gilda encounters and embodies changing attitudes about race, gender and sexuality. She’s also just a really cool heroine thanks to Jewell’s writing. That was definitely enough to win the book two Lambda Literary Awards (for both fiction and science fiction).