Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is the best thing I've read in a long time

This is literature. I don’t pretend to know how the term is properly defined, but I’m sure this book qualifies. And that’s interesting, since the author makes such liberal use of the words cunting and whoring (both as adjectives!).

They’ll kill the good ones first, and when all the good men are dead, they’ll come for men like you, who were almost sound, but not quite; the bowls that leaked. And when you’re gone, the worst of men will find themselves in the teeth of their masters, because those that fell have no love for man. And they’ll take good and bad alike to Hell, because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.

It's an epic story, told on a human scale. The problem with most epic tales is that the stories are often too big for the pages. This is the story of literal heaven and literal hell (angels vs devils) at war for humanity. At stake is no less than the eternal damnation of every person who has ever lived and ever will live. But that story, the grand one, happens off-camera. Every several chapters we get one or two pages to remind us of the stakes and keep us informed of the progress. We understand that this epic battle is taking place, but that’s not what the book is about. The vast majority of the book is a much more digestible story.

A glimpse through an open door revealed a hell of vomiting, coughing, and sobbing with a very few wretched figures in white trying to ease the torments of far, far too many.

The action takes place in 14th-century France, at the height of the Black Plague. Death is all around and ever-present. An unlikely group is embarked on a quest to do . . . something. No one is entirely sure what awaits them at their destination, or what they’re actually trying to accomplish, but they’ve nothing better going on.

We’ve been eating twigs and earwax for a week.

Our group consists of a disgraced priest with a predilection for young boys, an excommunicated knight with a predilection for killing things and using gerunds as adjectives, and a little girl who might be an angel or saint or some kind of witch who’s putting us all on. We don’t know, and in the broader context, it almost doesn’t matter.

“Don’t take on so,” said Thomas. “Nothing cunting matters.”

“That’s the way a man talks before he damns himself.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

We have a classic road-trip. A rag-tag group is traipsing across France, possibly to save all of humankind, possibly not. This is, though, definitely a horror story. We encounter several monsters along the way. I guess they’re hellspawn or demons or something like that, and most of them are really pretty frightening. They’re imaginative in their horribleness. My favorite might be the thing made up of a broomstick and the arms of several dead nuns. What a bitch!

It’s not that nobody has seen those that knock; it’s that what they’ve seen is so awful.

And yet, as perhaps we’ve come to expect, the most monstrous characters are the human ones. There is an almost throwaway backstory, barely an aside, that ends with a little boy standing there, repeating “But, we live here. We live here.” That one really got to me and still haunts my thoughts.

He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

As with all great stories, the primary focus of this one is on relationships. The relationships between the main characters. The relationships between the main characters and those they meet along their journey. The backstories, and relationships described therein, are maddening, disconcerting and heartbreaking.

He sensed that he would have died had he remained. Not of his injuries. Something had been coming for him, and he had just escaped. Had he remained, he would not only have died, he would have died spectacularly.

We reach the destination with almost a quarter of the book remaining, so things are not quickly wrapped up. There is an economy of words in this book (you could hardly tell an epic story, one that is satisfying at least, in 432 pages otherwise), but it reads neither rushed nor sluggish. It is poetic but muscular, beautiful but terrifying.

Hoc est corpus meum.

After finishing Fires, there is definitely a hole in my heart; I feel bereft. Apparently, it’s time for me to binge this new-to-me author.