Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman Review: Visceral Medieval Horror with Genuine Soul

A novel that uses the Black Death as both historical scaffold and theological battlefield, Between Two Fires is one of the more distinctive entries in modern historical horror fiction.

Between Two Fires is a historical fiction horror novel originally published in 2012, now reissued by Tor Nightfire. Its premise is at once historically grounded and cosmically scaled: Lucifer and the fallen angels have sparked another war against Heaven by engineering the Black Death, and God appears to have withdrawn, leaving angels and humanity to endure the consequences largely alone. Into this apocalyptic vacuum rides Thomas, a French knight turned brigand after the Battle of Crécy — his lands stripped by the Comte d'Évreux, his standing in the Church revoked by excommunication. Thomas rescues a young girl named Delphine from assault and finds himself drawn into a mission he did not choose: Delphine claims to see angels and instructs Thomas to escort her first to Paris, then to the papal seat at Avignon. Along the road they are joined by Father Matthieu, a gay alcoholic priest whose own disgrace — he was discovered with another man and lost the trust of his congregation — mirrors Thomas's fallen state. The trio makes for an unusual fellowship, united less by faith than by the fact that every other option has been foreclosed by plague, starvation, and demonic violence.

The novel is structured as a quest narrative, but one that consistently refuses easy momentum. Each leg of the journey introduces a fresh order of horror: in Paris, Delphine receives the Holy Spear from a relic seller, and the group is immediately attacked by possessed statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints. Father Matthieu is killed by a demon in the River Rhône. Thomas encounters the Comte d'Évreux on the open road and kills him in a duel before the two survivors, disguised as lord and page, press on to Avignon. There, the stakes crystallize: Delphine reveals that Pope Clement VI has been replaced by a demon, and the group must kill the imposter. The climax involves the resurrection of the true Clement VI, the deaths of Thomas and Robert (Matthieu's brother, himself entangled in the cardinal's household), and Delphine's death by the Holy Spear — from which the archangel Michael and the heavenly host emerge to defeat the false pope's demonic army. Thomas's soul is dragged to Hell, where he is tortured until Delphine, in an act recalling the Harrowing of Hell, descends to find him. The structure is dense and operatic, and it earns its scale.

According to critic Jason Golomb, redemption and renewal are major themes of the novel, alongside the theological question of why God permits catastrophes like the Black Death. These are not decorative concerns — the entire journey is organized around them. Thomas's arc from excommunicated brigand to reluctant instrument of divine will, Matthieu's quiet dignity in the face of his congregation's rejection, and Delphine's role as a vessel of hope in a landscape of total devastation all serve Buehlman's engagement with medieval Christian cosmology. The novel, as noted by one reader at mypagebypaige.com, carries themes of hope and redemption that remain true to biblical lore even as the horror intensifies. Kirkus Reviews, in a positive notice, described the book as one that "doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors" — a formulation that captures something real about how the novel holds darkness and grace in tension.

The novel is explicitly and deliberately graphic. SFFWorld observed that Buehlman "does not skimp on the visceral details of what the travellers see and experience," and the same source noted that the gruesome specificity — decapitation, amputation, torture — at times risks tipping into the gratuitous, comparing the density of gore to a medieval Saw film at its most relentless. This is a genuine tension in the work. The horror is not incidental; it is structural, meant to communicate the reality of a world genuinely coming apart at the seams. But readers with a low threshold for sustained graphic violence will find the novel demanding in ways that have nothing to do with its theological complexity. The book is, as Barnes & Noble describes it, "a medieval horror adventure unlike anything on the shelf" — a claim that reflects both its ambition and the intensity of its methods.

Between Two Fires has found a notably wide audience for a work of this darkness and density, driven in part by substantial BookTok attention that Barnes & Noble has publicly documented. Kirkus Reviews' early designation of Buehlman as "an author to watch" has aged into something closer to confirmation: the novel's reissue by Tor Nightfire speaks to its durability. Readers drawn to historically grounded horror, medieval settings, or fiction that takes religious cosmology seriously as a dramatic engine — rather than as backdrop — will find the novel operating at a high level. Those who prefer horror that earns its bleakness through atmosphere rather than graphic accumulation may find the balance harder to sustain. The novel is, at its core, a story about what hope costs in the worst of all possible worlds, and it does not let that question rest easily.