Christopher Buehlman is a native Floridian and author of the literary horror novels Those Across the River and Between Two Fires. He won the 2007 Bridport Prize in poetry and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for best novel in 2012 for Those Across The River. He is also the author of several provocative plays, including Hot Nights for the War Wives of Ithaka. Many know him as comedian Christophe the Insultor, something of a cult figure on the renaissance festival circuit. Christopher holds a Bachelor’s degree in French Language from Florida State University, where he minored in History. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.

Andrew has long known that magic was a brutal game requiring blood sacrifice and a willingness to confront death, but his many years of peace and comfort have left him soft, more concerned with maintaining false youth than with seeing to his own defense. Now a monster straight from the pages of Russian folklore is coming for him, and frost and death are coming with her.

Praise for The Necromancer’s House:

“The logic of the plot is eclipsed by the eruption of characters who evoke Dickensian whimsy and range from the merely unusual to the bizarrely imaginative. Within this magical universe, rivalries, revenge, and self-seeking contend with the willingness to sacrifice. The final confrontation, evolving in part from Andrew’s prior service to Baba Yaga and her daughter Marina’s defiance, wreaks an ambiguous ending in an explosion of enthralling fantasy. The vibrant, bracing atmosphere easily overpowers any niggling concerns about a few incongruous incidents.” – Publishers Weekly

“Buehlman quickly grabs the reader’s interest and holds it until the last page. His method of jumping from one event to an ostensibly unconnected one works surprisingly well in exploring the complicated characters and their various obstacles. And though seemingly unrelated at first glance, the various mysteries of the book come together in a completely unexpected way. The characters are very dynamic; each has his or her own struggles and secrets that add to the mysteries of the book, and finally, the modern mystical setting makes full use of technology, magic and science.” – RT Book Reviews

The year is 1348. The Black Death ravages France, leaving fields and rivers choked with unburied dead and causing whole towns to disappear. Thomas, a disgraced knight, roams the land with a band of thieves, living by the sword; when they encounter an orphaned girl in a dying village, Thomas has just enough humanity in him to save her from his colleagues.

No ordinary child, this girl sees angels and talks to the dead. She tells Thomas that Lucifer and the fallen angels have risen in a new war on Heaven, that the kingdoms of men have fallen behind the lines of battle, and that he must now shepherd her on a holy quest to tip the scales in favor of good. Between Two Firesinvites you on a journey that is at once a fool’s errand into great danger, and a violent man’s first, uncertain steps toward redemption.

The year is 1935. Veteran of the Great War and failed academic Frank Nichols ignores a warning not to move into the home he inherits in the small southern town of Whitbrow; a home his wife calls “The Canary House” because of its fresh coat of yellow paint.

But there is another house in the woods beyond the river, an estate that lies in ruins; the once-magnificent Savoyard plantation, where a cruel forebear of Frank’s drove his slaves to murder him. Frank means to find this ruin and write about the horrors that occurred there, but little does he suspect that his presence in town will stir something that should have been left sleeping. Something with a long memory. If the people of Whitbrow have forgotten why they don’t go across the river, they will soon remember.