I’m about to say something that might seem odd coming from an English major. I love horror in all its forms. I love watching horror movies, I love playing horror video games, and I barely read horror novels… I’m fake, I know. I made up for this by reading a horror novel back in May (out of season but it still counts) Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is a medieval horror story about a trio consisting of a dishonored knight, a homosexual priest and angelic girls road- trip through a plague stricken France that is caught in a holy war between heaven and hell. The monster of the week style format is fun, and all the horrors they encounter are both terrifying and cool in equal measure. The characters are fun, the encounters are intense and overall baring my pickiness with prose and some endgame plot moments, it’s a mostly well-written visceral read. If you’re looking for something to read this Halloween, you can’t really go wrong with reading this book. If I was writing this blog back in May I would’ve had more to say about it, but instead the burning question that I had after finishing my reading back in May has only further intensified in this spooky month of Halloween:

Why is Medieval horror so overlooked?

I remember back in the zombie craze days we had all sorts of zombies: slow zombies, fast zombies, island zombies, mushroom zombies, vaguely human zombies, boyfriend zombies, pride and prejudice and zombies; however, there was never any zombie apocalypse in a random peasant field or castle or something. (I’m still bitter I never got a video game where I was a knight surviving a zombie apocalypse) It always kind of struck me as rather odd at how ignored this section of time is for horror when there are a lot of places you can go. You have disease, crazy religious zealotry and fiefdom nonsense to work with and we haven’t even gotten to the supernatural stuff yet. To go back to Between Two Fires for a brief second, a lot of the moments I think back are when they walk through these disease ridden towns that are full of starving hopeless people and that kind of oppressive atmosphere I feel can serve plenty of different horror stories. Then there’s the supernatural stuff you can pull from and they have all sorts of folk tales and cautionary tales that could instill the fear of god into you. There’s just a lot of potential for storytelling that seems to be just sitting there. I should also mention that Between Two Fires was originally a commercial flop before being recently saved from flop status by Booktok; consequently, there is a possibility that maybe medieval horror will see an uprising in popularity but I still think it’s odd that it took this long and I can think of no real substantial reason as to why. To close things off though, and this could just be me, but when I think of potential zombie hunters King Arthur round table or Charlemagne or anyone really come to mind before Elizabeth and Darcy.