Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman

Book 27 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. It is almost impossible to imagine how horrible life must have been during the Black Death. The plague killed between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe rapidly and in particularly nasty ways, causing a complete collapse of the social order and infrastructure. I cannot even fathom struggling to find food when you can’t even go to your neighbors for help because they might infect you with an illness that will kill you faster than starvation. To the people of the era, it must have felt like they had been abandoned by God; in his 2012 horror novel Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman weaves a story that treats this quite literally. The novel originally came out in 2012, but it was rereleased this year in a lovely new edition with a foreword by Joe Hill and a…