The Thrice-Bound Fool by Christopher Buehlman Review: A Grimoire With Teeth

Kinch and Galva flee the Takers Guild with a spellbook that bites, in a darker, sadder and funnier Blacktongue sequel.

The Thrice-Bound Fool is the second novel in Christopher Buehlman’s Blacktongue series, and it lands from Tor Books on 13 October 2026. Kinch Na Shannack, thief and debtor, and Galva, the knight sworn to death, are on the run with a stolen spellbook that wants them both dead. Buehlman came up through horror, with Those Across the River and Between Two Fires, and it shows. This is grimdark fantasy with rot in its roots and a joke on every page. I look at the living grimoire, the pull between laughter and grief, and the one flaw that keeps it from five stars. The Thrice-Bound Fool review below explains why it still earns its place on your shelf.

Buehlman writes grimdark fantasy with a horror writer’s nerve and a comic’s timing, and the living grimoire at its heart is a petty, spiteful joy. The road over the Thralls wanders more than it should, but when the jokes turn to grief, few writers in fantasy do it better.

Honey From a Dead Man’s Ribs

There is a dead lion on every tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Bees drift up out of its carcass, and under it sits Samson’s old riddle about sweetness coming out of the strong. British kitchens have kept that picture in the cupboard for well over a hundred years. Nobody flinches. We pour it on our porridge.

Christopher Buehlman knows that trick in his bones. Deep in the third chapter of The Thrice-Bound Fool, Kinch Na Shannack buys a jar of mountain honey, finds a short, coarse hair in his mouthful, and then walks past the trees where the local bees keep their hives. The hives are corpses. This is how the hill folk honour their dead. And Kinch, a sworn servant of the god of mischief, digs out two more fingers of the stuff and laughs until he nearly chokes.

That one scene tells you most of what you need to know. It is filthy. It is tender. It is funny in a way that sits right on top of something rotten. And it keeps asking you to take another bite.

This is the second Blacktongue novel, and it picks up close behind The Blacktongue Thief. Kinch is a thief with the Debtor’s Hand tattooed on his cheek, which means the Takers Guild owns a slice of him and any tavern drunk can slap him for a free pint. Galva is a knight from Ispanthia who worships Dalgatha, the Skinny Woman, and serves her queen with a love she keeps under armour. Between them they have stolen the Book of the Full Shadow, one of only twelve. It is alive. It loathes them. The Guild wants it back. So they head west, past the last scruffy villages of Oustrim, and over the Thrall Mountains, where the known world simply stops.

Their guide is Worrig, a small, fingers-short Wostran with a crossbow, a spear, three visible knives and a sideline in arson. Kinch hires him mostly because he can say yes, no and maybe in Holtish. The other candidate was a man Kinch had watched with a goat that morning. You will not need me to finish that joke. Buehlman certainly doesn’t.

Is The Thrice-Bound Fool Horror?

Not on the shelf. Waterstones files it under epic fantasy, and Tor sells it as a rollicking adventure. But peel the jokes back and you find a horror novel’s bones, and they have been there from the start.

Buehlman came into print as a horror writer. Those Across the River earned him a World Fantasy Award nomination. Between Two Fires sent a knight and a strange girl across a France gutted by plague and fallen angels. The Necromancer’s House, The Lesser Dead and The Suicide Motor Club followed. When he spoke to GNoH about the Between Two Fires reissue, he traced how a poet, a playwright and a Renaissance fair insult comic all ended up in the same prose. All three are still at work here. The horror writer never left the building.

Take the book itself. The cursed tome is horror’s oldest furniture. Lovecraft had his Necronomicon, Chambers had The King in Yellow, and Sam Raimi had a book bound in skin that woke the dead in a cabin. Buehlman’s version is something new, because it is petty.

On a night at an inn in the foothills, it wriggles out of its bag while Kinch sleeps. Words ink themselves onto a blank page in Gunnish, and a voice made of several voices speaks them a beat later. The book is not taking dictation. It is giving it. A mouth has opened in the outside wall of the inn, and it is calling the locals to come and kill the thieves for a reward.

Kinch goes out the window with an iron tent stake, because iron kills magic. The mouth does not beg at first. It scolds. It lists its own importance, then pelts him with insults like a furious aunt at a wedding. Then he drives the stake home. It dies squealing, bleeding ink, and turns back into wall.

Then comes the last beat. The illustration of the mouth is back on its page, a little paler for the ink it lost. And now it is smiling.

Look at how that passage is built. Kinch’s voice is loose and chatty for pages, all digressions and wisecracks. Then, as the danger lands, the paragraphs shrink to a word or a line apiece. The comic stops talking, and you hear the room. It is a stand-up’s trick, the pause before the punchline, but here the punchline is a threat. By the third chapter the book is riding in the donkey’s saddlebag with a rusty bear trap clamped over it, writhing now and then like a spoilt infant. It is a grimoire with the temper of a toddler and the reach of a secret police force. That combination is funny right up to the moment it is not.

The war is never far off either. Galva grinds her teeth in her sleep and stabs at dream goblins. Most of the men of Manreach were ground up in the Threshers’ War, which is why the only village still dishing out shame to an adulteress is one so remote its men missed the muster. Kinch jokes that maybe war is not all bad. The joke curdles as you read it. That is the point.

There is also a long riff in the third chapter about what every religion promises after death. Each faith has its own paradise, Kinch notes, and nobody agrees on it. Hell gets far more consensus. What they all agree on is what death is not: lying still in a hole, rotting. Which is, as he points out, the only thing death actually looks like from the outside. It is a bleak little sermon from a man who has just been pulling beaver faces behind his guide’s back, and it is the most horror-soaked page in the opening stretch.

Galva deserves her own paragraph. When I reviewed The Daughters’ War, I said she was in danger of knocking Gemmell’s Waylander off the top of my list of fantasy heroes. Nothing here lets her down. She rarely speaks, and when she does, it counts. Her rare attempt at a joke with Worrig lands on a sore spot, or seems to, and he plays at taking offence before breaking into a grin. Kinch sees her relief and reads it right. She was not relieved that he forgave her. She was relieved she would not have to kill him. It takes two lines. Most writers would need a chapter.

How The Thrice-Bound Fool Compares to The Blacktongue Thief

The first book was a road novel, and so is this one. That is both its charm and its limitation, and the limitation deserves more than a shrug.

The Thrice-Bound Fool takes its time. The early chapters are about buying a donkey, haggling in a language Kinch can read but not speak, hiring a guide and choosing a hat. Every scene is good company. Almost none of them push the story forward. The book’s great hook, the fact that Kinch must crack a murderous text to save a queen, spends long stretches locked in a bear trap in a saddlebag.

When the threads do pull tight, in the back third, the wait pays off, and the book reaches for grief as readily as it reaches for a knob gag. Still, not every detour on the way earns its keep, and a leaner middle would have made this the equal of the first book, not its slightly baggier sibling.

What has grown is the heart. Kinch has always been funnier than he is brave, and he still is. But there is a moment early on where a taste of honey hands him a memory of his favourite niece as a baby, bouncing for joy at her first spoonful. It is a small thing. It is also where the book shows its hand. Every joke Kinch makes is a way of holding something off. Sometimes it is the cold. Sometimes it is the Guild. Sometimes it is simply the dark.

The obvious comparisons all apply. Kinch talks like Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora on a bad day, and the grunt’s-eye grime of Glen Cook’s Black Company is all over the mountain passes. But Terry Pratchett is the ghost at this table. Pratchett knew that a joke could carry moral weight. Buehlman knows it can carry a corpse too.

He also writes the funniest language gags in fantasy right now. Kinch reads most tongues and speaks few, so every deal is a guessing game. Worrig asks for the Holtish word for bee and gets one with an obscenity welded to the front. He adopts it on the spot, delighted. It is a cheap laugh, and it works, because language in this book is never neutral. It is how the Guild owns you. It is how the book hunts you. It is how a scared man makes a stranger into a friend.

Kinch’s whole creed fits in one line from that honey scene: “The most important thing about serving mischief is to laugh when the joke’s on you.” Everything else in the book is built on that. The god of mischief is a fox in the treeline who may or may not be there. The Guild is a joke with teeth. The mountains are a joke with a longer punchline. And death, for Kinch, is the one gag he refuses to let land.

Eat the honey, then. Just don’t look up at the trees.

The Verdict: Is The Thrice-Bound Fool Worth Reading?

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