Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is the horror novel that takes the Black Death as a backdrop and then asks: what if the plague wasn't the worst thing happening? Published in 2012, the book follows Thomas, a disgraced French knight, who discovers an orphan girl named Delphine wandering alone in the ruins of a village. She sees things he can't. She hears instructions from somewhere he'd rather not think about. Together with a complicated priest named Father Matthieu, the three travel south through a France that has become, quite literally, a battleground between Heaven and Hell. This is Buehlman at his most ambitious, and it works almost completely.
What the book actually is
People who pick up Between Two Fires expecting straightforward medieval fiction will find something stranger. Buehlman isn't writing historical fantasy with horror elements; he's writing theological horror with a historical frame. The demons in this book are specific, named, hierarchical, and terrifying in ways that rely on genuine medieval demonology. The angels are worse. They don't comfort. They instruct. The gap between divine command and human comprehension is where most of the book's dread lives.
The prose does something unusual too. Buehlman shifts registers between third-person chapters following Thomas and italicised interludes written in the voice of a demon observing events from a distance. Those interludes are the most formally daring thing in the book. The demon's narration is wry, ancient, and deeply unsettling, not because it's grotesque but because it sounds almost reasonable. Almost fond.
Thomas, Delphine, and what connects them
Thomas is not a hero. He's a knight who did something shameful, who has spent years drinking and taking mercenary work to avoid thinking about it. Buehlman doesn't redeem him cheaply. Thomas makes selfish choices well into the novel's second half. What keeps him readable is that his selfishness is legible and grounded in specific, named failures rather than vague backstory guilt.
Delphine is rarer in horror fiction: a child character who functions as a genuine narrative engine rather than a symbol. She is strange and sometimes frightening and clearly carrying something larger than herself. Buehlman resists explaining her too early or too completely, which is the right call. By the time her nature becomes clearer, you've already been watching her survive things no child should survive, and that weight carries through to the ending.
Father Matthieu arrives later and complicates everything in useful ways. His faith is real, his doubt is real, and he doesn't resolve neatly into either saint or hypocrite. Three characters, and all three earn their pages.
The horror itself
Buehlman writes physical horror with real precision. The plague villages the group moves through are described in terms of smell and texture before sight, which is the right choice: it makes the devastation immediate rather than scenic. When the supernatural violence arrives, and it does arrive, repeatedly, it lands harder because of how carefully the mundane suffering has been established first.
The demon sequences are the sections most likely to stay with you. One early chapter depicting what Hell is actually doing to the souls of plague victims is among the most genuinely disturbing passages in recent horror fiction. Buehlman doesn't linger gratuitously. He writes the thing and moves on, which makes it worse.
Readers who loved The Fisherman by John Langan will find a comparable seriousness of purpose here. Both novels treat horror as a mode capable of asking real theological and moral questions, and both earn their darkness by surrounding it with grief and love and specific human detail. Where Langan reaches toward Lovecraftian mythology, Buehlman works inside a Christian cosmology he takes completely seriously, which gives the book a different flavour but comparable weight.
Where it strains
The novel's middle section loses a little momentum. The trio's journey through the south of France involves several encounters that feel episodic in ways the opening chapters don't. Each encounter is individually strong, but strung together they create a rhythm that starts to feel slightly predictable: arrive, discover horror, survive, move on. Buehlman breaks this pattern decisively in the final third, but there are roughly fifty pages in the middle where the reader senses the structure more than they should.
The ending divides readers. It's not ambiguous in the The Haunting of Hill House sense, where ambiguity is the point. It's more that Buehlman makes a specific tonal choice that some readers find satisfying and others find abrupt. Both responses are legitimate. What isn't legitimate is calling it a failure. The book earns the ending it has.
Buehlman's place in horror fiction
Christopher Buehlman has written five novels, and all of them operate in the territory where literary fiction and horror overlap. Those Across the River (2011) is rural Southern Gothic. The Necromancer's House (2013) is contemporary dark fantasy. The Lesser Dead (2014) is vampire fiction set in 1970s New York, and it's genuinely excellent. But Between Two Fires is the one that operates at the highest level of ambition, and it's the one that horror readers most reliably underestimate before they read it.
The closest comparison in recent genre fiction might be the work found in The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: both novels use the specific conventions of horror to carry questions that genre fiction doesn't always have the courage to ask directly. Jones asks about cultural memory and inherited violence. Buehlman asks about divine indifference and what obedience costs a person who can still feel pain. Neither book backs away from the answer.
The verdict
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is one of the most underread horror novels of the past fifteen years. It's set in a medieval France that feels genuinely medieval rather than costumed-contemporary, it features three characters who earn the reader's attention without demanding their sympathy, and it treats its theological framework with the seriousness it deserves. The demon chapters alone are worth the price. Read it before you read anyone else's recommendation about what to read next. It won't leave your thoughts quickly, and it shouldn't.