Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman Review: Dark Medieval Horror of Devastating Ambition

Between Two Fires is a historical horror novel, originally published in 2012 and now available in a Tor Nightfire edition. Its premise is sweeping and unsparing: Lucifer and the fallen angels have launched another war against Heaven, and their chosen weapon is the Black Death. God, for reasons the novel leaves deliberately open, appears to withdraw — leaving his angels and humanity to fend for themselves across a France littered with mass graves and roaming demons. Into this apocalyptic landscape steps Thomas, a French knight-turned-brigand excommunicated after the Battle of Crécy when the Comte d'Évreux stole his lands. Thomas rescues a young girl named Delphine from assault, and Delphine, who claims to see angels, tasks him with escorting her first to Paris and then to Avignon. The journey recruits a third companion: Father Matthieu, a gay alcoholic priest who lost his congregation after being discovered with another man. The trio's road through a devastated France is the spine of the novel — a pilgrimage through hell-on-earth with a genuinely cosmic destination.

What sets the novel apart from conventional plague fiction is the literalness of its supernatural threat. Buehlman does not use the Black Death as mere metaphor: fallen angels physically stalk the roads, possessed statues of the Virgin Mary and assorted saints attack the group as they leave Paris, and demons exact a toll on each member of the party. Matthieu is killed by a demon in the River Rhône. Thomas pursues his private vendetta against D'Évreux — killing him in a duel on the road — even as a far larger war presses in from every direction. The endgame in Avignon involves a demonic impersonation of Pope Clement VI, a resurrection, a harrowing of Hell, and the eruption of the archangel Michael and the heavenly host from Delphine's body. The scale escalates without losing the human stakes at its center.

Critical reception on publication was strongly positive. Critics praised Buehlman directly from its own pages, calling him "an author to watch" and noting that the novel "doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors." That balance — gallows humor coexisting with genuine dread — is a signature Buehlman quality. Writing for Tor.com, Alyx Dellamonica praised the novel's prose as an advance on Buehlman's debut and commended both its humorous dialogue and its deep immersion in the worldview and mindset of medieval Christian characters. Ron Hogan, writing for Shelf Awareness, credited Buehlman's fusion of modern horror sensibility with a rigorously rendered medieval setting as the work that secured his standing among leading dark fantasy authors. As a thematic project, the novel engages seriously with theodicy — why God permits catastrophes of the scale of the Black Death — while keeping redemption and renewal, as critic Jason Golomb noted, as its animating undercurrents.

The novel's ambitions are also the source of its most demanding qualities. The theological architecture — fallen angels, cosmic warfare, a harrowing of Hell, a demonic antipope — requires readers willing to engage with medieval Catholic cosmology on its own terms rather than at ironic distance. The brutality is not decorative: violence, plague, sexual assault, and the deaths of central characters including Matthieu, Thomas, and Delphine are all rendered without softening. Readers who prefer horror that withholds its supernatural stakes, or who find the grimness of Black Death settings unrelenting, may find the novel punishing rather than cathartic. The sheer density of the final act — resurrection, demonology, and eschatology converging — makes real demands on attention.

Between Two Fires belongs to a specific and underserved tradition: literary horror with genuine theological seriousness and medieval historical grounding. Readers who have gravitated toward works that treat the Middle Ages as a space of actual belief — where Heaven and Hell are not allegory but cosmological fact — will find Buehlman's execution rare. The three-person ensemble at the novel's heart, each carrying a specific kind of disgrace and seeking a specific kind of redemption, gives the cosmic warfare a human register it might otherwise lack. For readers who want dark fantasy with the weight of real history behind it and prose that, in Kirkus's words, does not flinch from lyrical writing even amid unspeakable horrors, this is a landmark title in the genre.