In a landscape devastated by plague, an orphaned girl, an excommunicated knight, a disgraced priest, and a donkey form an uneasy family and embark on a quest that takes them to the epicenter of a celestial conflict.
“This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.”
Angels and demons are on the move in plague ravaged medieval France. But despite the highly imaginative, fantastical elements, the realistic characters and firm grounding in place and time give the novel a certain plausibility, which makes it all the more horrific.
The characters are finely drawn and complex, and each is fully embedded in the religious mindset of the time. But the novel is never preachy, because the characters, including the clergy, are deeply flawed. In addition, the religious entities battling for supremacy are playing their own game, and humans are an afterthought or playthings. Even the angels bring little comfort: they are cosmic-horror, old testament-type angles, not Christmas card angles.
Some scenes have a dream or nightmare like quality, but throughout, the gritty, bloody, and corpse riddled setting is meticulously rendered. The ability of microbes – the second “fire” or agent of existential horror in this novel – to indiscriminately devastate humanity is described in gory detail; the novel is not pretty but surprising moments of humor and joy are sprinkled throughout.
This excellent horror/fantasy/historical adventure has a similar feel to other man and child survival epics including The Road and The Last of Us. Fans of horror podcasts and cosmic horror/fantasy web serials may also enjoy this gorgeously written and poignant novel.