Shambleau and Others

This was amazing! For those of you who don't like "purple prose", you might ought to just jog on, but for fans of H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and the like, you need some C. L. Moore in your life. This was her very first story. Unbelievably good.

She sets up a sort of noir/hard-boiled dynamic with Northwest Smith and his Venusian buddy Yarol, but their criminal(?) deeds are not the focus of the story, or even spelled out for us. It's all about this "Shambleau" that Smith tries to save from an angry mob. She's a femme fatale unlike any you've read before.

Hard, uncompromising, strong, practical, and at the end of each tale it isn’t Jirel’s prowess with the sword, or Smith’s speed and skill with his blaster that come through as the determining factors, it’s their mental strength that enable them to overcome the sticky situations they find themselves in. Indeed, there is very little physical action at all throughout this collection. This is part of the reason why for me these individuals are elevated beyond the archetypal hero of typical pulp fare, and into the realms of true literary characters. They have so much, well… character.

Complete review at: The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey, and a close-up examination of the book itself.