Making it to Avignon becomes her quest, and along the way, she picks up Thomas, a knight and a veteran of Crécy turned brigand, and Père Matthieu, a gay alcoholic priest, and the novel becomes a sort of Canterbury Tales-made-demonic-and-horrifying.Īnd I mean horrifying. They tell her that there is a new war between angels and devils afoot, and the corrupted heart of evil is in Avignon, the seat of the papacy post-Western Schism.

It follows a peasant girl Delphine, who has shades of Joan of Arc she speaks to angels and angels speak to her. It’s the most mindbending piece of theological horror I’ve ever read, and I adore theological horror. This book was absolutely demented and, as I gave it five stars, I clearly mean that in the best way possible.īetween Two Fires is set in 1348 in Black Death-ravaged France, but it’s not a straightforward historical. 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, demons, saints, and the risen dead-and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.Book Review: Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlmanīetween Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman

There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God.

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 fallen behind the lines of conflict. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village.

And Lucifer said, 'Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of heaven down.' The year is 1348. Now Christopher Buehlman invites readers into an even darker age-one of temptation and corruption, of war in heaven and of hell on earth. His extraordinary debut, Those across the River, was hailed as 'genre-bending Southern horror' (California Literary Review) and 'graceful and] horrific' (Patricia Briggs).

Between two fires horror