Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
A Novel
Title: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Author: V.E. Schwab
Publisher: Tor
Publication Year: 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Rating: 5 stars
I have discussed multiple times before how I am a big V.E. Schwab fan girl. I was an intern in the publicity department of Tor around when Vicious came out and one of the publicists recommended it to me and I’ve been hooked ever since. So of course, when she announced that the pre-orders were open for Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (back in June of 2024), I immediately pre-ordered it. Then I had to wait and wait and then wait some more while the book shipped. It finally got here a week after it was published and I dove right in. As usual, she did not disappoint.
Before she could really divulge any major information about this project to readers, Schwab described it as “toxic lesbian vampires,” which is a pretty great and concise elevator pitch.
The book centers around three characters: Sabine (née María), who died and became a vampire in Spain in 1532, Charlotte “Lottie,” who died and became a vampire in 1827 in England, and Alice, who died and became a vampire in 2019 in the US.
Interestingly, while it is clear that the characters in this book are vampires, that word is hardly ever used in the book and several of the characters really don’t like to use it at all. The euphemism they prefer throughout the book is that they were buried or planted in the midnight soil from a poem that is repeated several times:
Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.
Much of the other vampire lore we see in the book matches the tradition of vampire literature: they drink blood, they don’t age, they are hurt (but not killed) by the sun, to kill them you must burn them, stake them, or decapitate them, they have to be invited in, etc. However, Schwab adds her own spin to some of the vampire myths to keep things fresh as well: these vampires can go for long periods of time without eating, they can go into churches and onto hallowed ground, but not into graveyards because “death calls to death,” and while they do not age, they do start to mentally/emotionally decompose. To put it into Freudian terms, when they decompose, they start to lose their ego and superego and their id takes over. They lose the kindness and compassion that once defined them as humans and become lost in their hunger and their desire to hunt.
Because the three women in this book come from such different settings, they are all looking for something different: Sabine is looking for freedom and escape from her marriage and the pressure to have children that she doesn’t want and for someone to love her for who she is, Lottie is looking for an escape from proper English society and space and time to be herself and love who she loves without pressure and judgement, and Alice is looking to escape the grief of her past and become her own person rather than a shadow of her sister Catty. When they become vampires, none of them fully know what they are getting into and thus can’t make an informed decision about it. Alice isn’t given an option at all. Sabine and Alice find themselves alone after their transformation and have to figure out the contours of their new lives by themselves until they are able to find guidance later. Lottie has Sabine to guide her, but Sabine has an agenda in turning Lottie and skews the information she supplies to best fit her needs rather than Lottie’s. All of them can be morally gray.
Something that I was very impressed by in this book was the way Schwab writes these morally gray characters. They all do experience actual hardships and obstacles, many of which come from existing as a woman in society. I could relate to or at least understand these struggles from a historical viewpoint and I was rooting for them to find freedom and fulfillment. However, ever so subtly, throughout the book this finding freedom and fulfillment starts to require them stepping on the freedoms and fulfillments of others. In each of their stories, I found myself asking, “Wait, when did the hero become the villain?” I went from loving the characters and rooting for them to rooting against them (though I do still love a villain). By the end, I wasn’t really sure what I even wanted to happen because I had such complex feelings about all of the characters.
I thought the structure of the book was really interesting. The book starts with Sabine, around a decade before she becomes a vampire. Then it switches between Sabine’s point of view in the 1520s and Alice’s point of view in 2019. Lottie exists in Alice’s story almost from the very beginning, but the reader doesn’t really start to see Lottie’s point of view until the second half of the book after she has already made an appearance in Sabine’s and Alice’s timelines. Lottie is, in fact, the unifying force of the entire story, but she remains a mystery to the reader until almost the end. I think logistically that has to do with the fact that very little in her story happens before she meets Sabine, but it still felt weird that such an essential part of the book was a mystery for so long. It was different, but I really liked it and I thought it worked well.
I know from reading Schwab’s monthly newsletter that she really likes the Interview with the Vampire TV series. I haven’t seen it, but I did recently read the book for the first time and I can definitely see how the format of Interview with the Vampire might have inspired parts of this book. Similarly, at work right now, I’m working on the Penguin Speculative Fiction Special series, and one of the books in that series combines John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla. These are two of the first pieces of vampire literature in the English literary canon and Carmilla is the first toxic lesbian vampire in English literature. Of course, both of these stories heavily influenced all of the vampire literature that has come after them (including Dracula), but V.E. Schwab wrote the introduction for the Penguin edition, so I like to think her reading and thinking about these stories also inspired elements of this book.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil was the perfect combination of classic vampire lore and a fresh take on the genre. It gave me the elements of historical fiction that I often turn to while still giving me a modern heroine whose life I could relate to. I loved the complexity of the characters and how the way the story is told changed my feelings about them. This is a long book and it is a complex book, but it didn’t ever feel odious or stale. Like with all of Schwab’s previous books, I can see a lot of the elements that she uses in almost all of her stories (outsiders, strong female characters, identity, the passage of time, found family, freedom, duty), but also like with all of her other books this genre and story feels completely different from every other book she has written. V.E. Schwab has done it again!