Between two fires
And Lucifer said: “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of heaven down…” The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. 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 mission: 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. As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
3mentions
3people
2024–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Between Two Fires" is so good, I think about it a lot. From the same author (although, in a very different vein) I really enjoyed The Blacktongue Thief.
- I've been reading more than usual this year, have found it profoundly rewarding, and recommend it as an antidote to social media and news fixation to anyone who will listen to me.
A few of my favorite reads so far this year:
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
- Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman
- The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
- Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher
- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
- This is a fairly silly list really, missing the bulk of what's been good reads for the last quarter century(!). It's heavily biased tothings that have sold well in the past few years. That said, the books on here are quite good. I'd definitely recommend Black Leopard, Red Wolf if you want fantasy from completely different story genetics (non-Tolkien). Priory is more traditional but good fun.
Not on this list that I thought were particularly excellent, [goodreads rating in brackets]:
[4.26] Between Two Fires by Christopher Buhuelman https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543121-between-two-fir... Horror-Fantasy. Absolutely loved this book, a travelogue through France in the grip of the Black Plague...inflicted upon humanity by Lucifer in the war on Heaven. See the sights as God abandons his children and devils in both man and mythic form ruin His creation. Takes on a hallucinatory, Book of Revelations, William Blake on bad acid feel and builds to a tremendous crescendo while retaining deep heart and complex characters.
Christopher Buhuelman is one of my favorite "new" authors, his new fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief[4.22] and The Daughters War[4.3] are both excellent as well. His horror chops enable him to to make what might be more traditional fantasy stories much more impactful. For example, The Daughters War is about an desperate existential war against goblins that is fucking horrifying, which is impressive for a critter traditionally deployed for comic effect or disposable fodder for the heroes to kick about. Even though you "know" that humans win in the end because of the chronology of the series (this was book takes place before the The Blacktongue Thief which was published first), it doesn't feel like it ever. Which is the magic of good horror writing, and is often missing from fantasy which can feel like there are no real stakes sometimes despite the epic scales presented.
[4.22] Piranesi by Susanna Clark https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi Labyrinth-Fantasy. Another book I adored, this novel has a sense of place so tangible that I am convinced that it actually exists and Susanna has been there. Piransi lives in what amounts to a pocket dimension, an infinite labyrinthine house containing amongst other things an ocean whose tides rage through the halls, flooding and revealing them in turn.
[4.3] Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim... Alien Encounter-SciFi. Omitting this from any best of list shows the list isn't particularly serious, this novel is exceptional. On a distant exoplanet being terraformed for future humans, a disaster leaves the scientist in charge alone and cut off from humanity, and rather than seeding the new world with monkeys to be uplifted, she uplifts instead a small species of jumping spider. We experience its evolution across millenia and as its society reaches the space faring age, until it's encounter with the last desperate remnants of humanity, fleeing a doomed civilization and descending into barbarism. The narrative techniques to tell a story of this scope work exceptionally well and the whole tale moves quickly and with surprising emotional heft. To bring the audience to understand a world and society entirely unlike ours, and make it relatable and poignant is truly impressive. I really don't like spiders, but by the end of this book I was rooting for them... at humanity's expense.
Because of shifting demographics in the book buying market, readers looking for good yarns outside of the current trend of romantasy and/or cozy scifi/fantasy may feel a little left out, but there are tons of great authors that may be forgotten from these lists for a while. I heartily recommend:
Anything by Jay Kristoff https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735144.Jay_Kristoff, ex Nevernight[4.22] or Empire of the Vampire[4.35].
Anything by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215710.Joel_Shepherd, ex Spiral Wars series (scifi space opera with fascinating AI) [4.27-4.56], Cassandra Kressnov series (cyberpunk) [3.88-4.0], A Trial of Blood & Steel series (fantasy) [3.9-4.26].
Pierce Brown's Red Rising sci-fi series is excellent and magnificent in scope and scale.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie for gritty low fantasy with buckets of blood, humor, populated with legendary characters. The Bloody-Nine, Dogman, Black Dow, Caul mfing Shivers anyone? His latest series https://www.goodreads.com/series/211497-the-age-of-madness [4.45-4.6] was fantastic.
And of course the other books mentioned by other commenters, particularly anything by Ian M Banks.
