Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman stayed with me longer than I expected.

It’s an odyssey in the truest sense. Part horror, part something that almost leans into science fiction—not in machinery or futurism, but in scale. 

The setting is bleak in a way that doesn’t feel exaggerated. A medieval landscape hollowed out by plague, haunted by demons, and stripped of any real sense of safety. It’s not just that the world is dangerous—it feels abandoned. It imagines a god that once kept things in order stepping away and leaving the world broken at a fundamental level.

At the center of it are characters who don’t feel heroic in the traditional sense. Thomas, worn down and uncertain, moving forward more out of momentum than conviction. And the girl, Delphine—quiet, strange, carrying something you don’t fully understand, but know matters.

What makes the book work is the way it moves. It doesn’t rush. It’s character driven first and the circumstances they find themselves in feel unpredictable and often deeply uncomfortable. There are moments where you genuinely don’t know what comes next—not because the story is chaotic, but because it refuses to follow the paths you expect.

You find yourself asking, “and then what happens?”—and not in a casual way. In a way that pulls you forward.

There’s also something underneath it all. A tension between faith and despair, between judgment and mercy. It never fully explains itself, which I appreciated. It trusts you to sit with it.

And that lingered.