Nick Barlow reviewed The Gilda stories by Jewelle Gomez
Challenging style, interesting ideas
3 stars
This has one of my personal bugbears - constantly shifting perspective within scenes. Sometimes this can work, especially if it's making a wider point in the structure of the story, but here it's unfocused and jumping, making it hard to follow who is thinking what and who knows what at any particular point in a scene. A shame, because the central idea here of looking at two hundred or more years of history with a black lesbian vampire at the heart of the story is very good and throws up lots of interesting angles and ideas. The idea of powerful billionaires hunting vampires in order to secure their own immortality rings a lot differently now, when powerful men are literally injecting the blood of the young, than it might have done when originally published in the 90s.