Bury Our Bones In the Midnight Soil Is V.E. Schwab’s Answer to Interview with the Vampire
Vampire fiction is having yet another renaissance, thanks to the popularity of TV shows like Interview with the Vampire and a deluge of cross-genre novels, including Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire, Ali Hazelwood’s Bride, S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood, and so many more. Perhaps that makes the idea of a bestselling author of V.E. Schwab’s caliber dipping their toe into the genre even more exciting than it might be otherwise. Anyone who regularly reads fantasy already knows that Schwab is a chameleon-like author whose books run the gamut from sprawling tales of intricate magical worlds to delicately crafted horror stories and explorations of memory. Her latest, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil strikes out in a bold new direction for the author, a story that feels both completely modern and strangely timeless, and a book that feels very much like her answer to the famed Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice, if that original trio of texts were primarily centered around toxic lesbians.
In many ways, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil feels much like the feral, darker cousin of Schwab’s blockbuster The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. But where Addie was about immortality and memory, Bury Our Bones is about rage, an absolute refusal to go gently into that good night, and the inexhaustible desire to shape and control our own stories. A book about vampires in which the fact of the characters’ vampirism is fairly tertiary to everything else we’re watching unfold, this story is haunting and furious, empowering and heartbreaking by turns.
Told across two, and eventually three, timelines, the story begins in 16th-century Spain. Desperate for more power and control over her life in a society that says she should have neither, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount, only to find out that marriage to a rich man simply means she’s a prisoner kept in a slightly fancier cage. When a mysterious widow offers her a chance at escape and an autonomy she’s never dreamed of, she jumps at the chance, even though it comes with dark consequences. In 19th-century England, Charlotte is sent to live with an aunt after she’s caught kissing her (female) best friend, ostensibly to prepare to marry a man and force herself to fit into the contours of a life she doesn’t want. But a mysterious widow—who has a connection to the woman Maria met in the earlier timeline—tells her there’s a way for her to love who she chooses, if she’s willing to take the risk. Finally, in 2019, Scottish Harvard student Alice is trying to force herself to finally make some friends at her new school when a one-night stand leaves her displaying all the traditional signs (fans, low tolerance for sunlight, a craving for blood) of becoming a vampire. Determined to find out what’s happening to her, she scours Boston for the woman who turned her, in the hopes of somehow reclaiming her life. Or, if that’s not possible, some good old-fashioned revenge.
Though it takes most of the book for all three of these stories to intersect with one another’s, Schwab uses the narrative space wisely, crafting detailed backstories and intricate inner lives for her three protagonists, who you’ll come to care about long before there’s any sense of how their lives impact each other’s. In truth, we could probably read a whole book that’s about just one of these women and feel satisfied, but the deft way that Schwab draws comparisons between these characters and the periods in which they live is beautifully done. The historical details are rich and vivid, consistently underlining the ways that women have long been asked to make themselves smaller or hide key aspects of who they are in order to be accepted or even to simply survive in society.