Righter of Words Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Reviewed by Jenny A
In V. E. Schwab’s novel Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, we traverse across the centuries, following the experiences of three women: Maria, Alice, and Charlotte. Maria faces a marriage she doesn’t want, Charlotte deals with scandal inside a society she doesn’t quite fit in, and Alice struggles with starting school and with her grief. Though they are from vastly different times and places, their stories are increasingly intertwined. They have been, after all, planted in the same soil. And so, the blood will flow.
Ironically, I snacked on parmesan garlic pretzels while reading a good portion of this. Because, oh yeah, this is a vampire novel. That trend is back stronger than ever.
I’ve noticed that whenever the book is in present tense, Schwab gets lyrical and dark with her writing (just look at some of her previous books). It’s fun to be back here in this sort of style, just as it was fun to return to the Shades of Magic universe last year. I just like her writing in general, I suppose.
And this is a great novel. Juggling multiple timelines is something that Schwab has done effortlessly for years, and I still marvel at it. I never struggled to distinguish what was going on, what certain characters did and didn’t know, and the shifting back and forth always made sense thematically.
The characters are quite strong—not shocking, as Schwab seems to be making a name for herself writing tough women. Maria is by turns sympathetic and ruthless, Charlotte is relatable but also frustrating, and Alice is sweet yet with a hidden fierceness. I think the most well-characterized of the three is Maria, while Charlotte will probably be the most divisive. I still have mixed feelings about how her story played out—but unfortunately, I can’t say why: No spoilers here!
I will say, though, that Schwab seems to have a very limited field of vision when it comes to settings; Maria’s travels in particular are so Euro-centric, which I find to be ridiculous. She has all the time in the world, and yet doesn’t bother to venture even to Asia or Africa? Seriously? (Yes, she’s reluctant to travel long distances by ship, but that excuse only limits her somewhat.) I suspect/hope that this is more of a “write what you know” issue than intentional erasure or avoidance of these cultures—as perhaps Schwab has not personally been to those places—but it still seems to be an oversight within the plot. I would hate to be immortal, but if I were, I’d consider international travel to be a pretty decent consolation prize! Go see more places, Maria! Surely Europe gets boring after a century or so.
Anyway, speaking of immortality, I did enjoy how this book played with the traditional lore of vampires (at least, again, in the Western world. I don’t know about blood-drinking creatures in other cultures’ mythologies, though now I’m curious). We touched on most of the familiar traits: being in the sun, hypnotism, and so on. It was fun to see how Schwab tweaked these for her own purposes, especially since there was one revelation that meant I got to make a reference in my head to the show What We Do in the Shadows. (For those curious, it was Nandor’s line “We drank the blood of some people, but the people were on drugs, and now I’m a wizard!”). But I digress.
In the end, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a dark but fascinating tale. The historical settings feel rich in detail, and the character development is fascinating to witness. Some aspects of this novel’s scope felt far too narrow considering the immortality of the main characters, but overall, I had a good time within the world it presented. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s also well-written and entertaining.
Bury Our Bones is about brushing up against death and grinning at the touch. Plus, it’s about lesbian vampires!
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The Kirkus Review
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route…
In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough…
In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire…
Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
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ABA Q&A with V. E. Schwab, author of Indie-Next Top Pick
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
By Zoe Perzo
You’ve said before that stories come to you in bits and pieces. What was the starting point for you here? What came to you first?
It's so tricky to try and parse, because it is like ingredients in a meal. Some ingredients feel really large and essential, others feel almost like spice and seasoning. And some, by the time they get amalgamated into the finished meal, no one but me would ever know that they were there.
On one hand, there's some really obvious ones. I wanted to write a love letter to Anne Rice. I wanted to explore villainy in response to Killing Eve and what I saw as a progression of acceptability for women to be messy.
It's a really long time in the making too, because in some ways it's a reckoning with my earlier career, and with myself, and with the feeling that for so many years I tried to assimilate in every way possible in writing and publishing and tried to make myself smaller. That became a huge theme in the book — when the world tries to make you small.
I tried to be like, “Oh, don't pay attention to the fact that I'm femme, because I'll just use my initials.” Or “don't pay attention to the fact that I'm queer. It'll be subtextual, not textual. You won't even notice it, right?”
What you discover over time is that there's no assimilation. It’s never going to work. You're better off just telling the story that you want to tell.
And I specifically wanted to write queer villains. Villains are the heart of everything that I do, and I kept being told, “Oh, don't do that because it'll be conflating queerness and villainy.” What a reductive take — because what you're saying is that queer people don't get to be as complicated as their straight counterparts.
So, in some ways, this book is just allowing women to be messy and angry and broken and hungry. It's also just about hunger in every form that it takes, also the intoxication of being seen for who you are for the first time, even if you're being seen by the wrong person. It's also about queer communities and queer identity and closeting across history. It's like these three women represent three stages in my own coming out journey.
But at the same time — this is one of those ingredients that I feel like nobody else will know — one of the initial ingredients for this is that I'm an only child my parents instilled in me growing up that I should never have a one-night stand. Not for sexual health reasons, but because it was unsafe because it meant either going into a stranger's house or letting a stranger into yours. You don't know this person, something bad could happen.
So, one-night stand. Murder. These two things are going to go together. I thought how funny it would be if I have a teenage girl who has an excellent one night stand and wakes up dead. That was one of the core ingredients. It's inextricable from all of these lofty aspirations of examinations of queerness across time.
I love that. So, without spoiling anything, I do think that the ending we got was very fitting. It made sense. And for a little bit, I wasn’t sure which direction it was going to go — which I love. Did you entertain different endings? Or was this ending always the one you had?
I can nod my head so vigorously because, for me, endings are the entire point. Endings are why I tell stories.
When I write stories, I plan from the ending that I want to hit. So, I know before I ever start writing the novel exactly how it ends. I have rewritten books from scratch along the way, but this will be my 25th book, and in 25 stories I have never changed an ending. To me, that would negate the experience.
People either love or hate my endings, but they're really deeply intentional.
You kind of touched on this, but we meet so many characters who were all of the midnight soil, and they lived in very different ways — not just our main character. I want to know who you think you would be most like if you found yourself in this position.
VES: Well, most like or most want to be around? Because there's such different, right? I am most like Sabine minus the serial killing.
I think this is important about me, but the reason it took me until 27 to come out was I just genuinely didn't understand the options. I was so opaque, so Sabine's opacity is a thing that I relate to. She just genuinely doesn't understand that there are other choices until they're presented to her, so she just feels hungry and dissatisfied all the time. She's insatiable. She's frustrated by the parameters.
All she's thinking is “I want to break out. I want to break out.” Whatever that means. I related so much to that sense of just wanting to take control. I am most like Sabine in that way, for better or for worse. I just desperately want to be in control of whatever I'm feeling. I'm a control frequent it comes to writing. As I said, I understand what I'm building as I build it. It's an execution of an idea.
I'm slightly less emotional as a person than Charlotte, the middle character.
I obviously gave each one of them a piece of myself. Alice has my neuroses. Sabine has the hunger and this sense of never being satisfied, which I have in spades. Then Charlotte is just so fraught with feelings that she doesn't even want to have. She’s so desperate to be loved, which is not a thing I would say about myself, but so much of what I was working through in my coming out journey was being deserving of love or wanting somebody to see you for who you were. That's why she gets entrapped in the way that she does when the wrong person potentially sees her.
If I could choose anyone to be like, it would be Matteo, who's probably the healthiest character in this book. Matteo or Ezra. I like tend to really love my peripheral characters. I like to think that even when they're secondary characters in the book that you're reading, they’re very easily primary characters in their own stories. I want them to feel fully realized.
But alas, I fear I am Sabine. Creating Sabine was one of the most cathartic things I've ever done.
So, do you know what’s next for you? Anything you can tell us?
I do! Well, first up is the finale of the Villains series. Vicious came out in 2003, and Vengeful came out in 2018. What's so funny about these books is that they changed so much with both my evolution and the context in which they come out.
I just finished the first draft of the finale for the trilogy, Victorious, so that'll be coming out next year and will hopefully just ruin people.
Then I have the rest of Threads of Power, and I have something that I'm very excited by but that I can't talk about. Every time I do, I get in so much trouble. My publicist is like, “Just stop.”
Here's what I'll say: Addie LaRue and Bury Our Bones are set in the same world. I like to think of this as the garden. It's my version of a low fantasy. I want it to be a lyrical space where I get to play with the supernatural in our world.
With Addie LaRue, you met old gods. In Bury Our Bones, you meet vampires. But I definitely think that some other things are growing in the same garden.
VICTORIA “V. E.” SCHWAB is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including the acclaimed Shades universe, the Villains series, the City of Ghosts series, Gallant, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Fragile Threads of Power. When not haunting Paris streets or trudging up English hillsides, she can usually be found in Edinburgh, Scotland, tucked in the corner of a coffee shop, dreaming up monsters.