Between Two Fires

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Review: Howls from the Dark Ages: An Anthology of Medieval Horror edited by P L McMillan and Solomon Forse". Cemetery Dance Online. 2022-05-12 . Retrieved 2023-05-28.

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

Knight in Sour Armor: Despite Thomas' anger and cynicism, he can't shake off doing altruistic things still befitting of a virtuous knight, such as saving a girl from being raped, burying her father even if it puts him at risk of catching the plague, trying to find her a home, slaying a demon that's terrorizing a village, and so on. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned. I Love the Dead: During his feast, the Pope invites his guests to partake in a "hunt" for some "stags" inside a forest of gold and silver trees, with the stags being women wearing nothing but horned masks that the hunters are free to have sex with. The women are actually undead, with many measures taken to hide the coldness and decay in their bodies. Wham Line: The fifth and final section of the book is prefaced by one single line: "And the Lord made answer." And so you may not be happy, exactly, if you let Buehlman lure you across France with Delphine and Thomas, if you face with them the horrors unleashed by Hell upon a population that is left to question whether some great sin of theirs has earned all this wrath and punishment. But you will, indisputably, feel as though you have gone on the journey. In this book the reader takes every step along with its flawed and remarkable characters as they make their slow and frightened way to Avignon to see if they can save what remains of humanity… and possibly their own souls, too.

Humanoid Abomination: Numerous people the characters encounter are implied to be demons trying to tempt them off their path or just hinder them otherwise. They appear perfectly human, but they always give away some sign of their demonic nature, such as changing their coat of arms or suddenly disappearing the moment no one is watching. God Is Inept: The crux of the story is that God, for whatever reason, does not respond to the the fallen angels, even as they unleash their numerous calamities upon humanity and wage open war on Heaven. Ultimately averted. As it turns out, God isn't inept; He's just playing a longer game. The plague years. Somewhere in France, a disgraced knight meets a girl and saves her from being raped. From then on, they travel the ravaged land where there is almost nothing to eat and other people are dangerous either due to them being ill or savage or greedy. And then there are the angels. Honest-to-God (excuse the pun) angels. Fallen and otherwise. I thought some of the dream sequences were a bit confusing and I wondered at times where this sequence was really taking me.

Between Two Fires | CHRISTOPHER BUEHLMAN

TW: Blood, gore, torture, blasphemy, animal death, necrophilia, rape and child sexual abuse (non-explicit, but threatened or mentioned).He is the author of several novels, which range in setting from 14th century France to 1930s American South to modern-day New York.