#c l moore

[cosmosrebellion]

The main thing I've learned from the classic pulp sword and sorcery stories I've read so far is that wizards are shitheads and sore losers.

[retroillustrates]

Sword and Sorcery Trinity

[retrocatastrophy]

Why are there no Jirel memes/incorrect quotes yet?

[imsupposedtobestudying-whoops]

"As he stared into the diamond glitter he saw its brilliance slowly melt and darken, until the pinpoints of light had changed to pools that dimmed, and he was looking into black evil as elemental and vast as the space between the worlds, a dizzying blankness wherein dwelt unnameable horror . . . deep, deep . . . all about him the darkness was clouding.

[vintagerpg]

This is the Paperback Library collection Jirel of Joiry (1969), which collects (like most Joiry collections) all but one of C. L. Moore’s Jirel stories (omitted is her collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone”). The cover artist, unfortunately, is unknown.

These stories are alarmingly modern in sensibility, and starkly undercut a lot of escapist power fantasy that folks assume is baked into the genre — doubly shocking considering Jirel is the first female hero of sword and sorcery. The first details Jirel’s first dangerous brush with magic. This underscores the action of the second story, “Black God’s Kiss,” an acknowledged classic. That one see’s Jirel’s kingdom conquered. Rather than submit to the conqueror, who roughly tries to "kiss” her, Jirel attempts to tear his throat out with her teeth. Failing at that, she slips out of her cell and embarks on journey to a dark land accessed through a trap door beneath her castle, a phantasmagoric landscape of forests and mountains that somehow exist underground (in a wonderfully sinister bit, Jirel is initially enclosed in impenetrable darkness until she removes her crucifix). Horrible creatures live there. She seeks out the statue (is it a statue, though?) of the titular god and gives it a kiss, which she carries back and passes along to the conqueror, killing him.

“Black God’s Shadow” forces Jirel to reckon with the consequences of her actions in the previous story in ways that are honestly surprising now, let alone when the story was first published in 1934. “The Dark Land,” probably the weakest of the stories, involves another unwanted suitor. “Hellsgarde,” the final story, is a sinister treasure hunt.

And that’s it, unfortunately. Still, Jirel looms large. Her stories imply a much richer history beyond the events they present, though, even if we can only perceive them through a fog of imagination.

[cantsayidont]

December 1934. A Margaret Brundage cover announcing that this issue of WEIRD TALES features a Robert E. Howard novelette, along with a short story by Bassett Morgan ("The Vengeance of Ti Fong"); the novelette "Xeethra" by Clark Ashton Smith; and the novelette "Black God's Shadow" by C.L. Moore. Other contents include a translation of the Jean Ray story "Le gardien du cimetière"; a chapter of the serial "The Trail of the Cloven Hoof" by Arlton Eagie; short stories by Brooke Byrne, August Derleth, and Frank Owen; and interior art by H.R. Hammond.

[kekwcomics]

BYPASS TO OTHERNESS (Henry Kuttner and, most likely, Catherine Moore, 1961)

Art: Bob Blanchard

[magicwingslisten]

H.P. Lovecraft on C.L. Moore

As to the work of C. L. Moore—I don’t agree with your low estimate. These tales have a peculiar quality of cosmic weirdness, hard to define but easy to recognize, which marks them out as really unique. […] In these tales there is an indefinable atmosphere of vague outsideness & cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort. How notably they contrast with the average pulp product—whose bizarre subject-matter is wholly neutralized by the brisk, almost cheerful manner of narration! Whether the Moore tales will keep their pristine quality or deteriorate as their author picks up the methods, formulae, & style of cheap magazine fiction, still remains to be seen.

—H. P. Lovecraft to William F. Anger, 28 Jan 1935, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 227