2025 read #79: Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore.

Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore

212 pages

Published 1977

Read from October 27 to October 28

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I read Moore’s first story of Jirel, “Black God’s Kiss,” in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales (reviewed here). A pioneering work of Sword & Sorcery starring a capable and vengeful woman warrior, it was far and away my favorite fantasy short story from the 1930s, and quite likely my favorite written before 1979 (when the genre underwent its metamorphosis and became recognizably modern). Naturally, I just had to read the rest, here collected in a reprint volume.

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“Black God’s Kiss” (1934). In my earlier review, I said, “[T]his is classic weird fiction at its finest, crossing gritty Dark Ages warrior fantasy with alien world cosmic horror,” and gave it a rare A

“Black God’s Shadow” (1934). Printed two months after “Kiss,” this one opens by recontextualizing its ending, removing any ambiguity and underlining that, in disappointingly 1930s fashion, silly Jirel had actually loved the hateful Guillaume. God forbid a woman simply hate a man for conquering her fortress, killing her troops, and sexually assaulting her. (To quote one of my favorite current memes: God forbid a woman do anything.) All this serves as a flimsy pretext to send Jirel right back down into the otherworldly plane deep beneath her castle’s dungeons. It takes several pages for “Shadow” to feel like anything other than a rote retread of the superior original. Even then, it never feels as creative, or as beautifully bizarre, as the first story. Maybe C+

“Jirel Meets Magic” (1935). We get some of the original spirit back with a fresh change of scenery. Pursuing vengeance after an ambush kills some of her soldiers, Jirel conquers the castle of the wizard Giraud, only to find he has fled through a magic window into an unearthly woodland, where a great sorceress protects him. The story is fun and weird and toys with all sorts of 1930s tropes. (Doorways open to both dinosaur lands and a Dying Earth, though Jirel herself doesn’t go through them.) B

“The Dark Land” (1936). Jirel lies on her deathbed, having received a grievous wound in battle. But otherworldly bullshit isn’t done with her. Some supernatural jerk named Pav spirits her bodily to his kingdom, the dark land of Romne, to force her to be his bride. Jirel resists, and demands the opportunity to kill him before he claims her. Moore takes the gender norms of her time (submission is a woman’s default state in a relationship; a man “conquers” a woman; women will compete for a man, even if one of them was literally kidnapped by said man; etc.) and, while not really subverting them, does more interesting things with them than I’ve seen in stories this old. B-?

“Hellsgarde” (1939). I really dug the way this story opened, laying out Jirel’s quest and motivation with efficiency far ahead of its time. I also enjoyed the opening’s distinctly proto-D&D vibe: a cursed castle in a marsh, home of an undead lord, guarding a mysterious treasure. Unfortunately, the rest of the story doesn’t live up to that initial promise. Jirel finds the castle occupied by intangibly “deformed” people, and of course at this date, deformity = evil. In place of a dungeon crawl, we get a haunted house narrative with a ghost that does not respect consent. A bit disappointing, but still adequate, especially for the time period. I found the climax unexpectedly creative. C+

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And that’s it for this collection! While nothing matched the initial greatness of “Black God’s Kiss,” this might be the most consistently enjoyable series of stories I’ve ever read from this era.

This book lacks one original Jirel story, “Quest of the Starstone,” cowritten with Henry Kuttner, which was published in the November 1937 Weird Tales. The cover story for that issue, alas, looks like some Orientalist garbage from Seabury Quinn. Nonetheless, I’m enough of a completionist that I’ve downloaded the issue and plan to read it sometime soon. And of course, I'm looking forward to the authorized continuation of Jirel’s adventures by Molly Tanzer in an issue of New Edge Sword & Sorcery. That’ll be a treat to read.