Christopher Buehlman's horror novel charts an epic journey through plague-ridden Medieval France
Katie FraserKatie Fraser is The Bookseller's deputy books editor and chair of the New Adult Book Prize. She has chaired events at the Edinburgh
...moreThe writer and performer conjures up an apocalyptic French landscape, teeming with English invaders, demonic entities and the bubonic plague.
Katie Fraser is The Bookseller's deputy books editor and chair of the New Adult Book Prize. She has chaired events at the Edinburgh
...moreIt is moving day for performer and writer Christopher Buehlman. He has just arrived in Paris with his wife and cat, Jane (pictured), and has found time to chat about his medieval-set horror novel, Between Two Fires, while preventing a daring feline escape onto the terrace mid-conversation.
Between Two Fires is both old and new. Although originally released in October 2012 by US publisher Ace, “it didn’t get into very many people’s hands” and was “not financially successful, shall we say”. The novel subsequently “fell between the cracks” and Buehlman believed the death knell had sounded. “When you stumble in your sophomore effort in the 21st century, you go into, what I believe I am not being overdramatic in calling, a death spiral. For example, when my first novel Those Across the River was published it had a print run of 50,000. I don’t know what Between Two Fires’ initial print run was, but I remember hearing that when The Necromancer’s House, my third book, came out the run was 9,000.”
After reacquiring the rights, Buehlman self-published Between Two Fires on Kindle Direct Publishing and sold physical copies with a new cover at Renaissance fairs (events popular in the US that celebrate and recreate aspects of medieval and Renaissance life), where he performed his one-man, comedic show, Christophe the Insultor, Verbal Mercenary. Gradually, the book’s popularity grew. “It had a second life and this coincided with several things at once. The novel began to get a Reddit following. Somebody told me one day, ‘You’re huge on Reddit’, and I was like: ‘What does that mean?’ Another was that we’d signed a deal for The Blacktongue Thief with Tor [US] and Tor is exceptional at promotion. They started really beating the rushes, announcing that the book was coming and people were curious – ‘What else has he written?’ Then the third thing, which I wish had not happened, was the [Covid-19] pandemic.”
Between Two Fires is set in 1348, the year the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, spread across France. The country has been decimated. Corpses bloat rivers and fill the streets. Empty houses bear witness to the last moments of their occupants, their bodies wrought by fevers and buboes. It is a horror landscape all of its own. But Buehlman shakes things up, riffing off the road-trip novel by adding a dose of damnation. The novel imagines that the Book of Revelations, the apocalyptic final book in the New Testament, happens during the Black Death. The disease is Lucifer’s declaration of war against Heaven. “And one of the fallen, whose name was Azazel, said, shall we kill them with fire or with cold? And Lucifer spoke to him, saying, neither of these. What then, said the wicked angel. With a Great Plague, answered Lucifer.” And so, the novel begins.
There were several challenges. One was to make the creatures sufficiently fantastical and diabolical. Then make the tactics and the posture of the devils truly diabolic
In this death-strewn landscape we meet Thomas, a former knight turned brigand, who has survived by falling in with some rather unsavoury types. When a young girl asks the band of men to help her bury her father, things turn awry. To protect her, Thomas kills his travel companions and finds himself the unwitting protector of this precocious young girl, who is much more than she seems. She asks Thomas to escort her to Paris and then Avignon, the seat of the Pope.
At first begrudging, Thomas becomes her guardian and travel companion, and begins to see that she has been blessed by Heaven. She is the key to banishing the plague and the devil’s influence from France. Along the way the pair pick up the friendly, if slightly inebriated, Père Matthieu and together they must navigate treacherous terrain where evil and corruption run rife. For it is it not only the plague that stalks the land, but English invaders, outlaws and demons.
Lucifer did not just unleash disease, but a host of his unholy denizens onto the Earth and Buehlman’s demons will make your toes curl. Was it difficult to create demons worthy of Hell? It turns out, yes. “I can’t overstate what a challenge that felt like. [There were] several challenges. One was to make the creatures sufficiently fantastical and diabolical. Then make the tactics and the posture of the devils truly diabolic.” Buehlman has succeeded. On their journey, the trio encounter a nightmarish river entity, murderous stone statues and devils
that read like something straight from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
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Between Two Fires is a visceral, propulsive and reflective read, inspired by Buehlman’s interest in the Black Death. “I’ve always been fascinated with pestilence for good or ill,” he says. But the hellish setting and the gruesome fight scenes also offer fertile ground to pose questions about morality, forgiveness and faith. What does it mean to have faith? What does it mean to forgive someone who has caused you harm? How can you see the light when you are surrounded by death?
Buehlman frames these questions primarily through the conversations between Thomas and the girl, the pair building a strong repartee, but the reason for them lies much closer to home. “I was at a rough point in my first marriage when I was writing the book. I think my subconscious was working on issues in the marriage in the book. Not directly, there’s no direct corollaries there, but questions of forgiveness and things like that. So, I guess, I did find the answers I’d been looking for.”
A war between Heaven and Hell, the bubonic plague and the earthly arrival of demons and devils could be a bleak read, but Buehlman balances horror with dark humour. Conversations between Père Matthieu, the girl and Thomas often provide these moments of levity, but it also arises from unexpected encounters. During their travels, the group meet an Italian man, braving the journey back home to reunite with his wife. “His translation of news from home gave them a taste of Florentine dark humour,” Buehlman writes. “The mass graves, with their layers of bodies, lime and dirt, had inspired less reverential Tuscans to say the dead had ‘gone to the lasagna’.” Not the typical epithet given to burial, but representative of the time, says Buelhman who took the “lasagna” descriptor from a first-hand account he read during his research.
In Buehlman’s work “you will always find darkness and I think you will always find humour… I think that gives you enough chiaroscuro in tone. You’re laughing one minute and then horrified the next”. The two are “cousins”. He continues: “I’ve often wondered what laughter is. What purpose does it serve in our primate evolution? My personal suspicion… is that humour is short-circuited horror. Humour is a response we make to reassure each other that something bad was okay.”
Thomas, the girl and Père Matthieu will need every laugh they can muster and some help to reach Avignon where events conclude in a truly cinematic showdown, but for now Buehlman is on his own quest. It is time to find some bourbon and continue unpacking.
Metadata
Imprint Gollancz
Publication 5th March 2026
Formats HB (9781399638364, £22); EB (9781399638395, £22)
Rights sold US (Tor)
Editor Gillian Redfearn
Agent Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary
