Between Two Fires
Christopher Buehlman writes medieval horror like the world itself is spiritually infected
There are books that entertain you, books that impress you, and then there are books like Between Two Fires - books that feel as though they drag you bodily into another century and leave traces of soot, blood, and plague dust under your fingernails long after you finish them.
I absolutely adored this novel.
The title itself references a historical image from the era of the Black Death. During the Avignon Papacy, it was said the Pope held audiences seated between two fires in an attempt to purify the air from pestilence. Whether historically precise or not, the symbolism perfectly encapsulates the novel’s atmosphere: humanity caught between earthly catastrophe and something infernal pressing in from the dark.
At first, Between Two Fires appears deceptively simple. A brutal medieval road story set during the Plague. Mud, hunger, violence, exhausted men surviving one more miserable day. Then the world starts slipping sideways.
What makes Christopher Buehlman extraordinary here is not merely the horror itself, but his complete control over tone. The novel moves effortlessly between profanity, terror, tenderness, grotesque humor, and genuine spiritual unease without ever collapsing into parody or self-indulgence. That balance is incredibly rare.
Many dark fantasy novels mistake brutality for depth. Buehlman understands something far more important: horror is atmosphere first. The terror here does not come simply from violence or gore, but from the growing sensation that reality itself has become spiritually unstable. The world feels abandoned, diseased, corrupted at a metaphysical level - and yet the novel remains deeply human throughout.
The profanity, the crude humor, the exhaustion, the vulgarity of ordinary people trying to survive impossible circumstances - all of it makes the horror feel more believable, not less. These do not feel like modern fantasy characters performing medieval aesthetics. They feel like people genuinely living through the collapse of their understanding of God, suffering, and existence itself.
At several moments I genuinely did not know what emotional reaction the book wanted from me. Horror turns suddenly into beauty. Cruelty into tenderness. Wonder into revulsion. Buehlman constantly destabilizes the reader in the best possible way.
What ultimately elevates the novel beyond horror or fantasy is that beneath all the filth and despair lies an almost painful belief in human endurance. Even while surrounded by plague, death, blasphemy, and cosmic terror, the book never fully surrenders to nihilism. There remains something sacred hidden under all the ruin.
Between Two Fires is grotesque, hilarious, horrifying, vulgar, beautiful, and emotionally exhausting. It feels less like reading a fantasy novel and more like surviving a medieval nightmare someone remembered after waking from a fever.
A masterpiece of atmosphere.