Christopher Buehlman’s books are set in the past, and this spring the author is experiencing a time warp of his own. He’s traveling with his novel Between Two Fires for the second time—although, as he notes, it’s the “first time I’ve toured with this book as a success.” A success indeed: Fourteen years after it was first published, the Tor Nightfire edition of Between Two Fires debuted at #5 on the Publishers Weekly hardcover fiction bestseller list.
“It's such a joy to see [Christopher] have this success,” Tor executive editor Lindsey Hall says.
“A lot of authors will write forever and never get the audience they deserve.” Hall has also been Buehlman’s manager since 2019, signing the author after reading a draft of his novel The Blacktongue Thief. She credits that book with “starting a new genre” at the intersection of fantasy and horror—two genres with large and passionate fan bases that have come together to support Buehlman and his books.
Set in 1348, Between Two Fires follows a disgraced knight, an alcoholic priest, and a precocious girl who may or may not be a saint as they travel across plague-ravaged France, witnessing death on an apocalyptic scale. Along the way, they also encounter dragons, demons, and Biblically accurate angels that are just as, if not more, terrifying than their infernal counterparts.
Originally published by Penguin Random House’s Ace imprint in 2012, Between Two Fires didn’t take off upon its first printing. Buehlman recalls becoming increasingly discouraged on his initial book tour, where his visits to bookstores would be attended only by “the employee and two guests, one of whom thought it was somebody else.”
Since 2012, Buehlman has written more works that blend his two favorite genres, and Between Two Fires has become a pioneering title burgeoning subgenre of horror novels set in medieval times, such as Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints (Harper Voyager, 2025) and Hiron Ennes’s The Works of Vermin (Tor Nightfire, 2025).
Buehlman is modest about his influence: “I wish people would hurry up and write more” medieval horror, he says. “That's my favorite stuff to read.”
A lifelong Stephen King fan, Buehlman grew up in Florida, where he developed a love for renaissance faires. He says that faire audiences kept Between Two Fires alive after Buehlman was dropped by Ace after Penguin’s merger with Random House in 2013. “The company assured me they would stick with me, but that was before Random House came along and cleaned house. Things change, but it was all for the best." Discouraged, he returned to the renaissance faire circuit that had sustained him since his youth, performing a variety of personas like the roaming roast comic “Christophe the Insultor” and a character known simply as “Fat Shakespeare.”
It was fun work, but not particularly lucrative. And so in 2019, the same year that Buehlman signed with Hall, he bought back the rights to Between Two Fires from Penguin Random House, and began selling a self-published version of the book at faires and online. “I wanted to hand-sell the book between my shows, just to make a little extra money,” he says.
It was at that point that Between Two Fires “found its audience,” as Buehlman puts it, adding that “the pandemic came along and piqued people's interest” in the novel. (It does revolve around pestilence.) The book first gained traction on Reddit’s /horrorlit board—“Someone said to me one day, ‘you're big on Reddit,’ and I was like, what's a Reddit?,” Buehlman recalls—before going viral on TikTok.
“It's startling when you're unaware of a platform and you go open it up and suddenly there's everybody talking about you for all this time,” Buehlman says. “It was pretty amazing to see.”
Hall is not on TikTok, but the self-published version of Buehlman’s novel was selling well enough that she started to see signs of its online popularity in the real world as well. “I kept seeing it in McNally Jackson,” she says. “It was right there in the front of the store, and then also on the staff favorite [shelf]. It was facing out in two places. Getting to see it in the world was the most enchanting part for me.”
Self-publishing was going well for Buehlman. “It changed my life,” he says, and he was hesitant to “tamper with the formula.” Hall first broached the subject of a reprint after Tor published Buehlman’s sixth novel, the dark medieval fantasyThe Blacktongue Thief in 2021, but it took a few years for Buehlman to agree to pull his self-published version of Between Two Fires from Amazon.
“I think that relationship made him feel comfortable and excited” about bringing Between Two Fires back to a traditional publisher, Hall says, crediting their experience working together on the Blacktongue Thief book tour with establishing trust between them.
Aside from the cover art, little has changed about Between Two Fires throughout its multiple incarnations. Tor’s hardcover has the same cover art as Buehlman’s self-published version, featuring a black figure of a skeleton in knight’s armor against a red background. The text is virtually identical as well, save for a new forward by Joe Hill. (“It's a masterpiece,” Hall says. “You don't touch a masterpiece.”)
Now based in Paris, Buehlman is reteaming with Tor Nightfire for his next novel, which he’ll write after the conclusion of his book tour. “I'm thinking of Italy in the time of the cavalieri,” he says, referring to the elite knights of medieval Italian city-states. He’s currently learning Italian, and planning research trips to gather inspiration for his next work of blistering historical horror. His dreams have come true, and that means more nightmares for the rest of us.
