Well, you can’t say that reading Fantasy genre books is ever boring. Having last read and reviewed a lovely book involving magic and cats at a cat shelter, this novel is a bit of an about turn.
Between Two Fires is in the publisher’s details described as a story of medieval horror. For those of a filmic bent, think Blood on Satan’s Claw, or Witchfinder General.
At its simplest, the story is a quest. The world of medieval France in 1348 is a world in decay, with a Great Plague leaving bloated bodies on the ground and rotting in houses.
An adolescent girl, Delphine, persuades a weary excommunicated soldier, Thomas de Givras, to take her to Avignon. In a rather Joan-of-Arc moment, she has had visions saying that she must go there.
The soldier is, as you might expect, reluctant, but feels a duty to take her and protect her. Much of the novel is about the horrors that they encounter as they travel through small villages, towns Paris and then to Avignon. They meet a priest Frere Matthieu of Saint Martin le Preux, who also agrees to travel with them as he hopes to meet his brother, Robert Hanicotte who works as an aide to a cardinal who assists Pope Clement in his ecumenical duties there.
The bigger picture is that there are developments in the ongoing war between Heaven and Hell. The disease, the decay, the cruel heartlessness of many of the people they meet may be a consequence of this, as devils seem to run amok on Earth whilst God and his angels appear to do little.
The book is subtitled ‘An Epic Take of Medieval Horror’ and the description seems apt. Buehlman does not skimp on the visceral details of what the travellers see and experience. There are depictions of killing and torture throughout, not to mention beheadings, hanging, amputation and descriptions of those living and dead infected with the Plague. It is not a story for those faint of heart or squeamish.
It would be easy to claim that Buehlman has shown this merely for effect – because he can – and that the gruesome details of decapitation, amputation hanging and torture are like some medieval version of a Saw movie. At times, it almost felt gratuitous. There were times when this detail kept me reading, in an “That was awful – what can happen next?” kind of view. Like some of the depictions in paintings by Bosch or Breughel, the descriptions made me feel that our characters were not just travelling to Avignon, but also on a road to Hell, if they were not there already.
And yet, the violence has purpose. The details give the reader the impression of reality, that this brutality is bone-crushingly realistic for the time in which it is set.
Buehlman is an experienced enough writer to counterbalance this grimness with Grimdark humour to leaven things a little. (I can see why Joe Abercrombie likes this novel.) As well as this, there are also moments of beauty amidst the carnage, to give the characters and the readers hope.
Furthermore, our characters are not the simple caricatures I expected at first but nuanced and complex, even if morally ambiguous, which leads to thoughtful discourse, and ruminations on philosophy and religion.
I also liked that Buehlman’s use of language and his detailed and vivid descriptions manage to intermix history with fantasy. Thomas’s reminiscences on what happened to him in the Battle of Crecy in 1346 show us the horrors of war, whilst the war between Heaven and Hell also shows us that conflict is not just an Earthbound feature.
I’m not quite sure why Between Two Fires has suddenly reappeared since its first publication in the US. (I believe that this may be the books first published UK edition.) It is shocking, violent and relatively unflinching and unfiltered in its depictions of what Thomas Delphine and Matthieu experience, and this may be the reason.
However, I think that perhaps it is because, as Joe Hill intimates in his Introduction to this book, it speaks to us in 2026. In a post-Covid environment, having survived a global pandemic, and with society seemingly often dependent upon self-centred people in power who govern with a general cruelness, it may resonate with readers even more now than it did in 2012.
As a result, though, Between Two Fires may be a book that is difficult to recommend to everyone. It is grimly engrossing, heavy on the Grimdark and often unremittingly bleak in its depiction of a world where morals and ethics seem to have been mainly forgotten, and some may dislike the book for those reasons. Others (like I did) may find the book grimly engrossing, a story worth telling, and is done so with imagination and intelligence. I think that the author deserves kudos for not being afraid to show horrible situations unflinchingly.
It is also a standalone novel, and these days that is also a rarity.
Between Two Fires is a book that has things to say about now, even though it is set in a past. From the perspective of 2026 it is worth being given renewed attention, a welcome reappearance of a book that should have been more appreciated the first time around. Not for everyone, but I suspect it will be one I won’t forget in a hurry.
© 2026 Mark Yon
Hardback | Gollancz
BETWEEN TWO FIRES by Christopher Buehlman
First published February 2012. This edition is March 2026 | 358 pages
ISBN: 978 0356 529 318
