ABSTRACT
Modern literary adaptations include Michelene Wandor’s Guests in the Body (1986), a work that features interlinked stories about the exploits of dybbukim, and Ellen Galford’s 1998 novel, The Dyke and the Dybbuk, which queers the equation with a lesbian possession set in New York City during and after the Stonewall riots, and then in early 1980s Britain. Finally, a novella called The Dybbuk in Love by Sonya Taaffe appeared in 2007. Each of these fictional approaches draws on the melodrama and plays off the sexual tension and frisson of danger in which the topos of spirit possession tends to be steeped, accomplishing on the more localized scale of Jewish mythology what the various vampire novels of the last 20 years have achieved in adapting the ancient and medieval topos of the vampire lover for the postmodern age.
