On those rare occasions when Thomas and the girl (whose name is not revealed to the reader until surprisingly far into the book) have a brush with the sublime, Buehlman adopts a much more lyrical tone. However, this gritty and earthy atmosphere gives way to a much more phantasmagorical writing style whenever Thomas and his ward come into contact with the book’s numerous supernatural threats, some demonic in the traditional Biblical sense and others verging on Lovecraftian in nature. Most characters are-justifiably-paranoid or desperate, as any stranger could be a carrier of the plague or an opportunistic brigand intent on murder and thievery. Billed as a medieval horror novel, much of the book adopts a decidedly “grimdark” tone, somewhat akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but set in the late Middle Ages. The odyssey that follows blends perilous and down-to-earth struggles to survive with surreal encounters with the supernatural.
He agrees to take her as far as the next town, but unpredictable circumstances and the girl’s prophetic and compelling visions of angels and demons spur them on a much longer journey, from the ruins of Normandy to Paris and beyond. But when this strange, vulnerable girl turns up pleading for help, against his better instincts he allows himself to become her protector. A scarred veteran who handled himself capably in battle yet still saw his title and holdings stripped from him through the machinations of a rival, Thomas has discarded the tenets of chivalry and turned to banditry. The narrative begins with a fateful encounter between Thomas, a disgraced knight, and an orphaned girl hiding in a dilapidated farmhouse with the plague-ridden remains of her father. And indeed there may not be: the devout have concluded that God has turned his face from mankind, abandoning the earthly realm to the depredations of demons from the pit. The wealthy barricade themselves in palatial manors, ignoring the devastation outside their fortified walls and feasting like there is no tomorrow.
Survivors live in decimated villages, suspicious of their neighbors and outright hostile to outsiders. War and the Black Plague have ravaged the land. In fourteenth-century France, all hell is breaking loose. Between Two Fires by Christopher Beuhlman
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