It is my second favorite story in the collection, perhaps in significant part for that reason. After the first four stories, Hellsgarde is a bit of a breath of fresh air. The Dark Land suffers even more from once again taking Jirel to another dimension, but it may be the weirdest of them all, and it has more science fiction than the rest (I’ve noticed Moore likes to sneak small science fiction elements into even her more traditionally fantasy stories).

Jirel Meets Magic suffers a bit in comparison with the Hell of the first two stories, but it is a nonetheless a notable depiction of entering into fairyland. I would say she is a great sword and sorcery heroine, but the Jirel stories lean far more toward the weird tale and cosmic horror side of things than sword and sorcery.Īs with the Northwest Smith stories, which are surprisingly more weird tale and cosmic horror than space opera/planetary romance, Moore’s great strength here is her vivid, startling imagery and her grand ability to imbue things with a sense of pervading, creepy, otherworldly horror.īlack God’s Shadow is, as the name suggests, a direct sequel to Black God’s Kiss. The ending has made Black God’s Kiss rightly famous in the right circles. I won’t ruin the end of the story for you if you don’t already know it. I absolutely love the Stephen Hickman cover featuring one of my favorite images from Black God’s Kiss-the pale horses. I own the Ace Fantasy edition published in 1982. What follows is a terrifying trek through a Boschian hellscape full of terrifying, arresting imagery weirder than anything Bosch could envision. Unwilling to admit defeat, even to the last, Jirel girds herself for war and sneaks down to the bowels of her holdfast to its secret portal to Hell, seeking a weapon against Guillaume. Moore matches or even exceeds Howard in many ways (and that is very high praise from me), but Howard wrote an incredibly diverse body of stories, even just looking at the stories featuring a particular character.īlack God’s Kiss opens with Jirel defeated, Joiry taken, by the cruel Guillaume. The two collections give me a better appreciation of Robert E. More than fine, probably, in its original pulp magazine form, but it is very noticeable if you read the stories straight through. Each is spurred by one incandescently brilliant story and one great pulp character-here, Black God’s Kiss and the titular Jirel of Joiry-and feature vividly evocative prose and imagery, but both are stymied by the remaining stories being otherwise brilliant but simply too derivative of the first to form a truly great collection. Moore’s collected Jirel of Joiry stories suffer from the same problem as her Northwest Smith stories.