Between Two Fires
Between Two Fires
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Christopher Buehlman on Between Two Fires
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A pandemic that actually happenedThe project began with an editor’s question and a book Buehlman had read years earlier. His time researching Depression-era Georgia for his debut had shown him how much a novel gains from total immersion in a period, and he was ready to go further back. One book above all others fixed the destination.
Remembering Barbara Tuchman’s excellent book A Distant Mirror, I decided to drill down on the 14th century, the Hundred Years’ War, and, most centrally, The Black Death.
Once inside the period, he found that the scale of the catastrophe exceeded what he’d been taught. Satellite imaging had turned up evidence of entire villages that simply vanished, pushing modern estimates toward two-thirds of Europe’s population dead rather than one-third. For people as thoroughly Catholic as 14th-century Europeans, he reasoned, the plague would not have read as a public-health crisis but as the literal end of the world, with Christ expected over the horizon. In the novel, they are correct. His monsters belong to that same eschatological logic: there is no tricking or outrunning them.
No, it’s — they’re horrible and they play for keeps and they play dirty and the only way you’re going to win is to hide or be lucky or have divine help. [paraphrased from audio]
Alongside the historical research ran a long-standing personal frustration. Buehlman is an agnostic who takes the Sermon on the Mount seriously, and the distance between what Christ actually instructs and how most self-described Christians behave has bothered him for years. He built that gap into the book’s moral architecture from the start, giving Delphine a first instruction to Thomas that deliberately echoes the standard almost nobody in the novel meets.
The first directive the possibly divine Delphine gives Thomas is ‘Don’t kill him. Don’t kill anyone else again.’ That’s every bit as clear on the subject of violence as what scripture reports Christ’s instructions to be.
Stephen King’s The Stand, the novel about a plague that splits America between good and evil, gave Buehlman the structural model he needed: a vast, spiritually freighted catastrophe that forces a handful of characters to carry the weight of an entire civilization’s fate. He read it earlier than he probably should have, and it never left him.
There was one big influence, and that was Stephen King’s The Stand, which I read much earlier than I probably should have. Rather than cooking up a modern plague, however, it interested me to go back to the ‘original gangster’ pandemic and explore those bleak days.
He later told Paul Semel that the finished book became his favorite novel to write, a verdict he immediately complicated with three words: ‘Until now.’
How he wrote it
The door you have to openBuehlman was still on tour for his debut when he described the constraint that would govern research on the new book. The Depression-era South left some documentary record a novelist could check himself against; 14th-century France left far less, which meant the imaginative burden shifted.
The book I’m working on now takes place in the Middle Ages, so a great deal more invention is necessary when imagining daily life. There’s a lot we just don’t know. The important thing is not to contradict what we believe we do know.
The book’s structure traces a deliberate escalation: the world Thomas and Delphine move through grows progressively stranger as they travel south, and Buehlman made conscious decisions to protect that arc. The question of how much supernatural horror to expose before the book’s end sat at the center of every craft decision, and he had a specific reference point for why restraint and revelation both matter.
How much to show is always a challenge in horror. King nailed the conundrum in Danse Macabre, saying the thing outside the door is always more terrifying before you open that door. But you have to open it.
His editor at Penguin, Tom Colgan, caught a problem in the first draft that Buehlman hadn’t seen himself. Delphine, the girl at the novel’s center who may or may not be divine, doubted her own nature so persistently that the story’s internal logic collapsed. When Colgan named it, Buehlman recognized it immediately as something that had nothing to do with Delphine and everything to do with him.
That is author intrusion. You’re absolutely right. This is the secular author throwing the stuff in here. I’ve got to make her a person of faith. [paraphrased from audio]
Père Matthieu, the alcoholic priest who accompanies Thomas and Delphine on the road south, was not planned. He appeared during the writing and Buehlman let him stay, a decision he has never second-guessed. Matthieu is the character he describes as the most relatable of the three: gay in a century that punishes it, dependent on wine in a world running short of it, kind in circumstances that reward neither quality.
He just wandered out of the darkness with his lamp, looking for good people in a bad world. And, as with her, I let him speak.
For the 2026 Tor Nightfire edition, Buehlman removed a scene of attempted sexual assault that had appeared in the original 2012 publication. The revision was not a response to external pressure but a reckoning with a specific instinct he had when he was younger, one he has since come to see as a confusion between believability and necessity.
When I was younger, and I started this book more than 15 years ago, it was so important to me to make a scene believable that I sometimes forgot to ask whether telling that part of the story was necessary or kind.
On what the book is wrestling with
The Christian soldier problemThe theological contradiction Thomas embodies, a violent man trying to act under divine instruction that forbids violence, is not a puzzle Buehlman resolves. He placed it there because he cannot resolve it himself. His own position is the agnostic’s uncomfortable middle ground: no faith, but a persistent respect for a specific set of demands he thinks most Christians quietly ignore.
Full disclosure — I consider myself an agnostic, but I was educated in church doctrine and have great respect for the ‘red-letter words,’ especially the Sermon on the Mount, which seem to share a lot of semantic overlap with Buddhism, which I also respect without considering myself an adherent.
Thomas is a knight in a tradition that had spent centuries building theological scaffolding around the idea of holy war. Buehlman has no patience for that scaffolding, and the book is partly an argument against it, though he presents the argument through situation rather than through any character who wins the debate.
The Christian soldier is, for me, an oxymoron. I do believe there are times when it is incumbent on us to fight, to defend ourselves or those we love, but that’s not what Christ calls us to do.
Horror, in his framing, is not a genre that dwells on suffering for its own sake. It is a mechanism for making the contrast between suffering and relief felt at full intensity, something he thinks daily life rarely allows. The Black Death setting amplifies that contrast to an extreme the contemporary world can read only at a distance.
Isn’t finding joy despite horrors really at the core of the human experience? Some of us, and I count myself herein, have led lives of relative abundance and privilege — but no life is without pain, loss, and dread.
What he wants us to sit with
What the three of them still ask of himBuehlman finished the book and found the characters hadn’t finished with him. He described the experience of closing a novel he’d lived inside for years with a specific kind of grief: the material was still alive in his hands right up until it wasn’t, and that transition has a physical quality for him.
When I finish writing a novel, especially one I had immersed myself in to the extent I did in Between Two Fires, I experience a kind of literary post-partum melancholy; the characters and the story had been living, wet clay under my hands for a year, maybe years, and now I have to send them to the kiln to be baked still.
Each of the three main characters left him with a specific instruction he still uses. The instructions are not abstract moral lessons but corrections to habits he recognizes in himself, and he distributes them without sentimentality: Matthieu’s in particular carries a hard edge, because the gentleness Buehlman extends to the character is not the same as letting him off the hook.
Delphine reminds me to be forgiving. Thomas reminds me to be strong and to fight on even when afraid. Père Matthieu reminds me not to be too hard on myself — he spent too much of his life thinking he was failing because of traits that were never negative traits (homosexuality), or which were beyond his control (alcohol dependence).
The distinction he draws is precise: self-blame, he says, is not the same as confronting a harmful tendency, and Matthieu conflated the two for most of his life. Readers who have done the same will recognize the difference the moment he names it.