Hell comes to fourteenth-century France in this brutal, beautiful collision of history and horror.
You wonder, sometimes, what people actually believed in the fourteenth century. Not the sanitised version we get in textbooks, not the pageantry of knights and castles, but the real marrow of it. When you woke up in a village where half your neighbours had died overnight, when the sky looked wrong, and the priest started speaking in tongues, what did you think was happening? Christopher Buehlman answers that question in Between Two Fires. He answers it with blood, with bile, and with a tenderness that catches you completely off guard. The answer, it turns out, is terrifying. And beautiful. And absolutely unforgettable.
The year is 1348. The Black Death is sweeping through France. But in Buehlman’s telling, the plague isn’t just a disease. It’s the opening move in a war. Lucifer, sensing that God has abandoned creation, decides to test the hypothesis. He sends his demons up from hell to walk the earth, to corrupt and destroy, to see if anyone upstairs is still paying attention. Spoiler: they’re about to find out in ways that will leave you breathless.
Our guide through this nightmare is Thomas, a disgraced knight who fought on the wrong side at Crécy and lost everything. When we meet him, he’s running with a crew of brigands, men who rape and pillage because that’s what’s left to do. Then a girl walks into their camp. Her father just died. She needs help burying him. The brigands have other ideas. Thomas kills them instead. It’s not heroism, not at first. It’s just a man reaching his limit. But that limit becomes the starting point for something extraordinary.
The girl doesn’t give Thomas her name for a long time. She calls him Horse. He calls her Little Bird. She talks to angels, or something like angels, and they’ve told her she needs to go to Avignon. She doesn’t know why. Thomas agrees to take her. Along the way, they pick up Père Matthieu, a priest who drinks too much and questions everything, including whether God is even listening anymore. The three of them walk into hell together. And you will walk every step with them, grateful for the company.
Here’s what Buehlman understands that most horror writers don’t: terror is cumulative. It’s not the monster jumping out that stays with you. It’s the slow realisation that the world has stopped making sense. The journey in this book is episodic, almost picaresque in structure. Thomas, Delphine, and Matthieu move from village to village, from horror to horror. Each stop brings a new nightmare. A demon living in a river that mimics human voices.
A possessed statue of the Virgin Mary carrying a dead baby. A castle where the dead don’t stay dead, and the living wish they were. The monsters are inventive, grotesque, genuinely unsettling. And every single one of them serves a purpose. Each encounter tests something specific in our trio. Faith. Courage. The willingness to keep going when keeping going seems pointless. The book never wastes your time. Every nightmare earns its place.
The prose reads like someone translated the King James Bible into profanity and then set it on fire, and the result is glorious. Buehlman spent years performing as Christophe the Insultor at Renaissance festivals, and that background shows in the best possible way. The dialogue snaps with authenticity. Thomas and Matthieu trade barbs like old friends who’ve seen too much. The girl, Delphine, speaks in riddles that sound like truth and truths that sound like riddles. But underneath the banter, there’s a current of genuine desperation and genuine love. These people are scared. They’re tired. They’ve watched the world fall apart. And they keep going anyway.
Reading this prose is like watching someone carve a cathedral from a single block of wood using only a pocket knife. It’s painstaking, deliberate, and the detail work is astonishing. Buehlman knows his history cold. The plague villages feel real. The roads feel muddy. The hunger feels sharp. He also knows his theology, both the official kind and the folk kind. The demons don’t just show up and growl. They tempt. They bargain. They make arguments that will make you pause. The angels, when they finally appear, are not comfort. They’re Old Testament. They’re wheels within wheels full of eyes. They’re terrifying in their own right. And they’re perfect.
The book represents a massive leap forward from Buehlman’s earlier work. Those Across the River was good, a solid Southern Gothic horror with teeth. But it played inside genre boundaries. Between Two Fires doesn’t recognise boundaries. It’s horror, sure. It’s also historical fiction, road narrative, theological debate, and, surprisingly, a love story. Not romantic love, though there are hints of that. The love here is the harder kind. The kind that keeps walking when your feet have blisters and your hope has run out. The kind that makes you carry someone else’s weight because they can’t carry it themselves. The kind that saves the world, or at least one small piece of it.
If you strip away the plot, the monsters, the medieval trappings, what remains is a book about whether goodness means anything in a world that seems determined to punish it. Thomas starts the story believing he’s damned. He’s done terrible things. He’s lost his land, his wife, his honour. Protecting Delphine feels like a small gesture, maybe too little too late. But the book keeps asking: what if it’s not? What if the smallest gestures are the only ones that count? And what if they count for everything?
The book does something remarkable that few novels attempt and fewer still achieve. It makes you care. Deeply. Desperately. About Thomas, who can’t stop failing upward into grace. About Matthieu, who doubts his way into belief. About Delphine, who carries a secret that recontextualises everything. When characters face danger, you hold your breath. When they find moments of peace, you relax with them. When they lose people, and they do, because this is that kind of story, it hurts in ways that feel earned, not manipulative. You’ve covered miles with these people. You’ve shared their fires. You’ve heard their stories. Their joys become yours. Their sorrows too.
Between Two Fires belongs to a specific tradition, the one where ordinary people stumble into cosmic conflict and somehow matter. You see it in The Stand, though King’s plague is modern and his America recognisable. You see it in The Passage, though Cronin’s vampires are science experiments rather than fallen angels.
Closer comparisons might be to The Road, that other story of a man and a child walking through devastation, clinging to each other because there’s nothing else left. McCarthy’s world is secular, emptied of meaning. Buehlman’s is overfull with meaning, dripping with it, drowning in it. Both approaches work. But Buehlman’s offers something the other can’t: hope. Not easy, hope. Not a cheap hope. The hard kind that you have to fight for, bleed for, earn. It makes all the difference.
The horror here isn’t just the monsters. It’s the silence. God isn’t answering. Heaven isn’t intervening. The demons have free rein, and they’re using it. Thomas, Delphine, and Matthieu aren’t soldiers in a celestial army. They’re not chosen ones with special powers. They’re just people who decided to keep walking. That decision, the book suggests, might be enough. Might be everything. And that idea, that ordinary decency might matter in the face of cosmic evil, lands like a revelation.
Buehlman has written other books since this one, and they’re all worth your time. The Lesser Dead reinvents vampire fiction with wit and terror. The Suicide Motor Club does the same thing, but with cars and the American highway. The Blacktongue Thief shifts into full epic fantasy mode and lands perfectly, earning comparisons to Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch. But Between Two Fires remains his crowning achievement. This is what horror can do when it takes history, faith, and character seriously. It can break your heart and then, against all odds, put it back together stronger than before.
The ending delivers everything the journey promised and more. It earns its emotional weight through every page that came before. You finish the last page and sit with it for a while, not wanting to leave these characters, this world, this experience. You think about Thomas, about Delphine, about what they found at the end of their road. You think about whether you’d keep walking in their position. Whether you’d have the strength. And you realise the book has given you something rare: a story that makes you want to be better.
Some books entertain you. Some books impress you. This one changes you. Read it. You’ll thank yourself later.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
THE EPIC TALE OF MEDIEVAL HORROR DRIVING BOOKTOK WILD
‘A beautiful nightmare that grips you from start to finish’ VICTORIA AVEYARD
This edition includes a critical foreword from bestselling author Joe Hill
The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village.
An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm-that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict.
Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfil her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.
As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.
****
PRAISE FOR THE SMASH-HIT BETWEEN TWO FIRES
‘Breathlessly paced and fiercely cinematic, it’s just a classic’ JOE HILL
‘Buehlman is a master of horror’ ED CROCKER ‘An absolute masterpiece’ GRIMDARK MAGAZINE
‘Thoroughly riveting, visceral and, ultimately, hopeful’ FANFIADDICT
‘A harrowing, haunting, heartfelt journey into darkness’ JOE ABERCROMBIE
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