I made it about a third of the way through this book before giving up. It was all about atmosphere. Page after page of description of shadows and flickering lights and the voice forever calling. This was possibly the most repetition I've ever read in a book. It just felt like one long scene where the same things kept happening over and over. The plot is really bad too. A warrior princess punishes and evil conqueror and then falls in love with him and regrets it because she can't stop thinking about his muscley arms around her and the kiss that he stole from her. It's the ultimate "no means yes" sexist plot.

In this first third of the novel the main character was completely alone about 90% of the time, just wandering. Ugh!!! ( )

The cover is terrible, embarrassing.

Okay, that aside, the stories were pretty good pulp fantasy, and the first (title story) in particular had a nice twist ending. By the end, the recipe got a little old, but I suppose that's what one expects from the genre. Definitely different than modern fantasy, and worth a read if you can get past the cover, but don't feel too shy about skipping one of the middle stories if it's getting old. ( )

C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry might not have become a household name, but she was the first woman to carry a sword and sorcery series on her own. Her fiery red hair, unusually coloured eyes, and quick temper look like a cliche today, but in the 1930s, they were a revelation. And the stories in which Jirel featured--collected in their entirety in this volume--are lushly described and filled with imagery that begs for illustration. While the plots can be repetitive (they can pretty much all be summed up as "Jirel has to fight something, visits another world, wins the day"), the writing is among the best you'll find of her generation. Highly recommended to anyone interested in pulp fiction and the mothers of the fantasy genre, especially the title story, "Jirel Meets Magic," and "The Dark World." ( )

This volume from Paizo's Planet Library (which is a great and praiseworthy undertaking, although I’ll have to frown at the very sloppy copy editing for this volume which is full of typos) collects all of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories. It fulfills all the usual conditions for a true classic: It is old (all the stories in here were published in the period from 1934 to 1939), it was innovative back in its day (presenting the first ever female Sword & Sorcery protagonist, and – although that was not common knowledge at the time – written by a woman, too), and it had a significant impact on what came afterwards (it was a huge influence on female fantasy authors in the 70′s and 80′s, like C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee etc.). The stories are also very good and remain compelling and readable to this day.

They are not quite what one might expect from pulp magazine stories, though – while they undoubtedly belong to the Sword & Sorcery genre (which in itself, it should be noted, had one leg still firmly planted in the horror genre at this stage), there is not a lot of sword-swinging going on here, not even (with the exception of the final story which Moore co-wrote with her later husband Henry Kuttner) a lot of action – what you get instead are long and vivid descriptions of fantastic dreamscapes. Suzy McKee Charnas, in her excellent, enthusiastic introduction to this edition, points towards a possible reason why people might have looked for different things in the pulp literature during the 1930s than they do today – namely the scarcity of visual media back then (at least compared to today’s proliferation of images). She argues that today’s genre writers tend towards a sparser style because they rely on the diverse media to provide a visualization; and complementary to that, I think that in the first half of the twentieth century – in the absence of TV and video, internet and DVD – it fell to writers to supply their readers with pictures to feed their imaginations, leading to a more vivid style in their writings in order to conjure up weird and exotic images in their readers’ minds.

As for the style of the Jirel stories in particular, what it lacks in polish (the stories were all written early in her career), it more than makes up for in passion. McKee Charnas remarks in her introduction that Moore did not have much interest in small historical details but that her Middle Ages were a grand canvas, and the same can be said for her writing – it has an almost expressionist quality, she paints in raw, bold strokes, and her language has a distinct, driven rhythm to it that thrusts her vibrant images into the reader’s mind where they won’t get easily dislodged again.

“Passionate” seems to me to not only best describe Moore’s prose in these stories, but it is also what characterises their protagonist most concisely. While she is described as a strong and competent warrior, we do not see Jirel do much fighting here – instead, it is mostly by the force of her personality that she vanquishes her opponents, the fierceness of her temper and the strength of her determination. (And it might be interesting to compare Jirel with that other famous medieval warrior-woman as she appears in Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc and discuss the various meanings of passion involved here.) As is probably obvious from what I wrote earlier, this is yet another book where plot is not central to the enjoyment, in fact all of the stories in this collection have much the same basic plot (Jirel wanders / is snatched away into a fantastical realm where she faces and finally overcomes an opponent) and like most pulp tales of the period are best read and savoured one at a time rather than in quick succession.

I've got a bit of an odd relationship with many of the Weird Tales authors, and particularly the stories that they published therein.

Case in point, Catherine Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories, collected here in one volume, including the crossover with her other character, the space-faring Northwest Smith, that she wrote with her eventual husband, Henry Kuttner.

Now, in Moore's defence, these were written fairly earlier in Moore's career, and were not originally intended to be read in such close proximity to each other. But, at the same time, it's impossible to escape the impression that Moore didn't have that much of an idea beyond "sword-and-sorcery stories with a female lead"; the majority of the stories recycle the same basic plot — Jirel winds up in some alternate dimension where she faces off against an adversary wielding strange magics — and the prose veers between overwrought and repetitive — how many times do we need to be told of Jirel tossing her red hair, or about her yellow eyes? Eye-colour in particular appears to have been a thing for Moore at the time, as numerous characters have unusual eyes, which are then frequently described — or uninspiring, as evidenced in most of the action scenes.

It's one of those odd things, in that I read them and enjoy them but even while reading I'm never quite certain why that is. ( )