Between Two Fires

Product Information

So...Good book, but not a pleasant book. You need to be ready for that. It tells a complete story with complete characters and fills in it's gaps. It's thought provoking, enthralling and fairly original.

Between Two Fires - Christopher Buehlman - Google Books

But I never lost interest. Instead I was pulled in to what I first thought was going to be more of a Historical Fiction type of book with just a bit of Fantasy bend to it. And it definitely is a historical fiction setting/feel with beautifully crafted prose that flows easily. The story takes place in France, the year is 1348 and the land and people are ravaged with plague. Just the plague is horrifying enough. Then add in war and the cruelties of mankind. The book made it clear, this was quite a dreadful time and place to live. Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.” The Power of Blood: Delphine's holy blood can do more pain to demons than any human tool could ever hope to achieve. By coating Thomas' sword in it, she's able to turn it into a weapon that can hurt even Lucifer's generals. Fan Disservice: The stags in the Pope's feast, who are all voluptuous young women wearing nothing but stag masks. They're undead and rotting from the inside, with maggots crawling in their genitals. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what the hell I just read. I think it was deeply profound and probably changed my life, but I'm not sure yet. I'll have to read it at least twice more before I understand what actually happened. Of course I followed the plot, so I got it, but I didn't "get" it. To follow a book and to understand it are not always the same thing, which was profoundly demonstrated here.

Customer reviews

Between Two Fires sends Thomas and Delphine—along with a gay alcoholic priest, Père Matthieu—through the plague-ravaged countryside, to a Paris filled with corpses and horrors, and then on to Avignon, the final destination chosen by the girl’s alleged angels. It goes without saying that their road is filled with dangers. What is more striking is the profane and utterly disturbing nature of the hazards this trio faces. Berserk Button: Making light of the Battle of Crécy and insulting the men who fought and died in it is a good way to earn the ire of Thomas.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES | Kirkus Reviews BETWEEN TWO FIRES | Kirkus Reviews

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This was very different from the author's first novel, Those Across the River. It's so different in style and pacing and plot that I would never have guessed that the same person wrote them if I didn't know better. It's the same horror/historical fiction genre bender, although where Those Across the River was a slow, steady build to a final conflagration, this followed the more cyclical style of most quests. Build, action, lull. Build, action, lull. There were brief bouts of horror that left me breathless and a little traumatized, then a short breather, and then once more into the breach. Book Genre: Dark Fantasy, Fantasy, Fiction, Historical, Historical Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Horror, Medieval, ParanormalNightmare inducing dream sequences (leaving you and the characters of the book questioning reality). Dark, dark stuff. Hell unleashes the demons and Buehlman unleashes the suspense, horror and gore. A Knight-turned-theif/criminal meets a young girl orphaned by the plague. Together, they travel across a barren landscape filled with death and monsters of unbelievable proportions. A third man joins the quest, a wine-loving, disgraced Father who has homosexual proclivities. I really can't say anything further - because I went into the book with minimal knowledge and I was stunned by the quality of this tale. An instant re-read. Possibly one of my new favorites.