Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
Published 2012 · 448 pages · 135,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Dark Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Historical Fiction
How hard is Between Two Fires to read?
Between Two Fires scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- Buehlman writes vivid, precise modern prose with occasional medieval and ecclesiastical terms (flagellants, indulgences, the accoutrements of knighthood and the Church) that period-ground the book without requiring a glossary. It sits closer to accessible literary fiction like The Great Gatsby than to deliberately archaic historical pastiche.
- Sentence structure: 47 out of 100
- Sentences are controlled and often rhythmic, built for visceral immediacy in action and horror passages rather than nested subordination. Longer descriptive stretches appear in the quieter travel sections, but nothing approaches Jamesian or Faulknerian syntax.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel keeps its feet in concrete, often gruesome physical detail — plague symptoms, battlefield violence, road-weary travel — while regularly cutting to abstract theological argument about divine silence, free will, and whether faith survives without evidence. The concrete and the philosophical are given roughly equal weight.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Readers track a journey across 1348 France, an ensemble of temporary companions who don't all survive, real Avignon Papacy politics, and an invented angelic war unfolding in parallel interludes. It's dense with historical and cosmological detail but stays plot-forward rather than encyclopedic.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- The main thread is told in fairly direct third person with clear cause and effect. What requires inference is cosmic rather than plot-level: whether Delphine's angel is real, reliable, or self-serving is left for the reader to weigh rather than settled by the text.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The title itself names the book's central symbol — Thomas caught between the literal fires of plague pyres and the figurative fire of a war between Heaven and Hell. Angels, demons, and the recurring imagery of ash and flame carry meaning well beyond their literal function in scenes.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- The novel treats its theological stakes sincerely rather than satirically; Thomas's cynicism is a character trait the book takes seriously rather than an authorial wink. The irony that exists is grim and situational — a coward and killer cast as a chosen champion — not structural or stylistic.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The earthly plot lines close by the end — the journey to Avignon reaches a conclusion and character fates are resolved. The larger theological questions the book raises about divine silence and the war's ultimate outcome are left more open than the plot itself.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The main narrative follows Thomas, Delphine, and Matthieu in linear chronological order, but it's regularly interrupted by short interludes set in Heaven that show the celestial war from another vantage point, giving the book a two-track structure rather than a single continuous thread.
How Between Two Fires is regarded
Between Two Fires holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.