4.5 stars !
Somehow Mitchell Lüthi made the Middle Ages even darker.
What I love most about Lüthi's books is the atmosphere. The world feels sick. Plague has passed, but it hasn't really left. People are desperate for salvation, faith has become tangled with fear and manipulation, relics are being exploited, and everywhere you look there is this feeling that something is deeply wrong beneath the surface.
And then Lüthi throws demons, heresy, murdered priests, stolen relics, plague prophets, and cosmic horror into the middle of it.
Yeah. I'm in.
Pierre and Remi remain the heart of the story for me. I especially loved getting more of Pierre and seeing the questions surrounding him become even more disturbing. There is something incredibly compelling about a character who seems to exist somewhere between man, monster, saint, and something we don't fully understand.
And that's probably what I enjoyed most about this book: the morality is never comfortable.
Can something evil do something good?
Can something holy become corrupt?
Is faith still faith when it is driven by fear?
And what happens when the distinction between Heaven and Hell starts becoming less clear?
Lüthi doesn't give you easy answers. Instead, he throws you deeper into the mystery and lets you sit there feeling increasingly uncomfortable.
The horror is also fantastic. It's grotesque, biblical, grimy, and occasionally genuinely disturbing, but there is a strange sense of humor running through it as well. That balance worked surprisingly well for me.
I also really enjoyed the historical atmosphere. Lüthi has this ability to make medieval life feel tangible—the poverty, the superstition, the violence, the religion, the filth—without making the book feel like a history lesson.
If I had one complaint, it's that the story occasionally feels a little meandering, and I wanted the final stretch to breathe a little longer. Some of the ideas and characters arrive very quickly toward the end.
But honestly?
That ending.
You cannot give me that ending and expect me to calmly walk away.
I need the next book.