Between Two Fires is 2012 historical fiction, horror/fantasy novel written by Christopher Beuhlman. The story follows 3 main leads for a majority of the book’s length. A disgraced knight turned brigand named Thomas, a young, orphaned girl who seems to have the ability to speak with and see into the world of angels and demons named Delphine, and a troubled priest who’s drowning his sorrows and guilt in wine named Matthieu. We follow these 3 on an epic quest through plague torn France in 1348 as they make their way through Paris and Avignon and more on a quest for something greater, describing the devastation and bleakness the plague has left behind in its wake along the way. The descriptions in this book are fantastic, Buehlman leaves nothing on the table when it comes to describing the setting that the characters are in, the clothes they’re wearing, the thoughts they’re thinking, the food (or lack thereof) that they’re eating, and of course the brutality of the battles with men, monsters, and demons alike.
This book honestly felt like a mixture of a lot of things complied into 1. It was part a swords and shields epic as they fight and journey their way through France encountering knights, kings, and priests alike along the way. It also feels partly like a religious epic as Delphine is like the connection between our world and heaven and she’s guided by angels along her journey, while the demons that now roam the earth are hellbent on finding and stopping her and taking her to hell. Thomas and crew’s battles with the demon monsters were some of my favorite parts of the book, they felt nerve wracking and epic all the same and I found myself on the edge of my seat through their clashes, specifically with the 2 river monsters they encounter, but that’s as much detail as I’ll go into about that. The characters in this book were decently likeable, although pretty frustrating at times as well. Delphine was the only truly pure one in the novel. As we learned more of Thomas and Matthieu’s backstories throughout the book, those characters became more sympathetic and understandable. Matthieu was troubled with his past with his father, his sexuality, and his relationship with God because of that, but he feels this is his chance to make things right with himself and with God and does all he can to help Thomas and Delphine throughout the journey. Thomas was a fierce warrior on the battlefield who was disgraced after the loss at the Battle of Crecy and the death of his seigneur and had his land taken from him, so he met up with another group of rogues and turned to a thief once the plague hit, but he still has a moral code and a heart of gold that he has tried to bury deep long ago and just can’t let go of. I also felt drawn to Robert Hanicotte, Matthieu’s younger brother, who we don’t encounter till later on in the book, but I was quickly pulled into him as well and he drew a lot of sympathy, thought, and frustration alike from me. I felt he was a character with a good heart, who wanted to do the right thing, he was just on the wrong side and didn’t see it.
The evil in this book, the powerful demons who are manipulating the minds and spirits of the people already devastated by plague, are brutal and ruthless. The scenes with the demons are honestly horrifying a lot of the time, that’s where the horror in this novel really comes into play (that is if you don’t see plague torn France as already horrific enough). The things they say to and attempt to make our characters do when they’re manipulating their minds at points in the book are downright awful and disturbing, the way they created monsters out of human corpses was described both beautifully and disgustingly, and of course them infiltrating the church statues and going on a killing spree as concrete versions of Mary and the saints was one of the darkest and most controversial, yet entertaining parts of the novel. The angels were in equal parts as epic as well when they fully come into the fold. Delphine encounters them throughout the novel as they speak to and guide her, but it isn’t until some of the final showdowns where we meet some of the archangels and they fully let their presence and power be known. The way they’re described as beams of light who you can’t look directly at is, I guess a bit of a cop out as then you don’t have to spend as much time describing the angels in detail to us, but it did feel like a realistic representation as well. If something so powerful, majestic, and otherworldly as angels came to Earth for an epic showdown that is kind of the way I’d see it going down. It would be too much for the human eyes to comprehend and would end up looking like beams of light flashing through the sky. Or at least that’s a believable representation to me, as we truly have no idea how an angel or a demon would appear to us in all reality so we kind of just have to wing it (pun intended).
The ending, oh boy, the ending. I won’t go into grave detail as I feel like if you journey into this book, you definitely need to experience that for yourself. It felt a bit rushed to me. I’m not sure what he could’ve done to not really make it feel that way though. This book was paced at a slower-decent speed through like 400 pages, this is one of those epic quest/journey types of books. So, we spend a lot of time getting character backstories, roaming the French countryside and describing the devastation, and encountering friends and foes alike along the way that they either momentarily pal up with or have a battle with as they make their way to the eventual greater battle. The ending was still very epic don’t get me wrong. Angels and demons battling for Heaven and Earth alike, Thomas and Delphine attempting to complete their overall missions at the end of the journey, the grave descriptions of Hell, but after 400 pages of somewhat meandering (not in a bad way) and learning about these characters, the overall drive of the story and the reason for this quest in the first place just felt like it was a bit rushed through to reach an ending point. Again, I’m not sure if that was going to be avoidable given that this was a pretty long book that was building to this ultimate culmination at the end, but I was left wanting just a bit more meat on the bones in the finale. Regardless though, this is a book worth investing time into regardless. The language and violence throughout the novel are at times very dark and disturbing, and it does deal with a lot of religious themes, so if either or both of those things are going to bother you then this is probably not the book for you. It has a cool medieval epic vibe to it though, the main characters are likeable (even through moments of frustration), and you don’t mind spending extended periods of time with any of them, and at its heart I think this is a novel about redemption in the best possible way. That it’s never too late to let go of your anger and sadness and anguish of the past and fight for what’s right and what’s true in the present. It’s never too late to redeem your soul.
