Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman)

Between Two Fires
Christopher Buehlman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Horror
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In a France devastated by the Black Death and by encroaching English armies, excommunicated knight turned brigand Thomas struggles just to survive one more day, though he finds it harder and harder to remember why he needs to go on living at all. He's already lost everything that ever mattered to him - his title, his lands, his wife, his honor - and the horrors he witnesses and is party to make him feel like he's living through the end of days. Then he finds the girl in the tree. She is filled with a strange light and stranger purpose, as if she has been touched by a higher power... but in a world where devils walk abroad at night and Lucifer's army again storms the walls of Heaven while God stands either helpless or indifferent, how is Thomas to know whether that higher power is good or evil? Nevertheless, he finds himself traveling with her, witnessing miracles and atrocities, on the way to either ultimate salvation or eternal damnation.

REVIEW: I've read two books by Buehlman previously and been very impressed by both, so when I heard this one mentioned favorably on a podcast I listen to, I decided to give this title a try. As in his other works, Buehlman does not pull his punches, and in fact leans into them with gusto: this is not a story for the squeamish, for all that the horrors ultimately serve the greater story and atmosphere. Both the bleakness of a plague-riddled medieval Europe and the twisted visions of medieval ideas of Hell and damnation (and the equally terrifying inhumanity and might of Heaven's angels) are on full display, a surreal landscape both physical and spiritual for the characters to navigate and in which they often (and inevitably) lose their way. Thomas, first wounded gravely in battle and then unjustly stripped of both his lands and his hope of Heaven, has wrapped himself fully in the darkness and misery that surrounds him, but deep down has a core of inner goodness that even he cannot deny forever. The girl, clearly an instrument of forces beyond him, could be either evil or good, but it almost doesn't matter, as she gives him a purpose that he's been lacking too long, becoming a daughter figure who brings out his vestigial better nature. She herself does not precisely understand her own role in the greater quest, her childish naivete slowly worn down but never completely lost. Along the way, they gain and lose companions, enduring numerous setbacks and encounters with enemies human and otherwise, all while the devils around them grow stronger and more emboldened as humans often seem all too eager to indulge their own dark sides. At times reality melts and twists into nightmarish surreality, where the lines between what is happening and what is imagined are blurred to the point of nonexistence. There is, naturally, a strong religious vein running through the story, but it manages not to be as preachy and judgmental as many such stories. For all the darkness and raw, visceral horror, I devoured this book at a rate I haven't managed in quite some time (audiobooks notwithstanding).

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