Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is a 430 page standalone novel, initially published by Ace in 2012, later self-published, and now with a deluxe edition published by Tor Nightfire.

Genre

Horror

Subgenre

Medieval Horror

Description

And Lucifer “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of Heaven down…”

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 become their battleground. Is it delirium or is it faith?

Now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and give him―blood-stained and wretched as he is―a chance at redemption he long thought lost.

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.

Opening Line

Now in these days the Lord God had turned His face from the business of men; and the angels who had remained loyal to Him said to one another, we must look after the children of Adam.

My Thoughts

“She’s holy,” he said, the words strange in his mouth. “Goddamn it,” he added, and felt better.

I started seeing this medieval horror novel all over the internet within the past year, and in this handsome edition Joe Hill writes a foreword about its unusual journey from being published in 2012 to becoming a sensation fourteen years later (“…that same pop culture churn that can obliterate a work of art can also resurrect one”).

This book is about a disgraced knight turned brigand who finds himself ushering an orphan girl across the French countryside during The Black Death.

This book is also about an epic battle between God’s angels in Heaven and the fallen ones of Hell that bedevil the world when it seems He has abandoned his post.

These two stories are actually one and the same.

This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

The setting in this book is about as bleak as it gets! The plague in the fourteenth century eradicated somewhere in the ballpark of half of the entire population of Europe. Eventually there were too many dead bodies and not enough living ones to bury them, and those who had managed to survive became increasingly desperate–this is the world Thomas and Delphine are traveling through. Add to that some devils testing the waters by coming to the world of humankind to terrorize God’s favorite creation, and you have a recipe for some pretty gnarly horror! But in the end it’s also a fairly touching story about redemption.

Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them.

I would love to check out more of this author’s work!