BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL, by V.E. Schwab
I don’t think I’ll ever tire of vampires. I do, however, have my preferences. I like my vampires to be old and sexy and inhuman. I like when their immortality is still a kind of death. To me, a vampire should be a little miserable. Living forever sounds awesome until you remember that living is a long slog of repeated maintenance tasks. What is life but a continuous search for sustenance and then dealing with the aftermath of your consumption?
So I was pleased by the vampires in V.E. Schwab’s new novel, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.” They are very hungry, and very mad about it.
The novel follows three women across three different timelines. In 1530s Spain, María chafes at her family’s control over her life. She’s a wild child with red hair so bright that no dye or mud they use can cover it. María doesn’t want to get married or have children, as is expected of women of her time, but figures if she must, it should take her away from her small-minded family. She engineers her own marriage to a rich viscount in a bid for freedom, but finds herself bound further by his domineering nature. She’s eventually shipped off to her in-laws, held as a vessel for her husband to impregnate. Her only escape is visits to a mysterious, ageless widow who runs an apothecary. “I want to be free,” María says, as she is finally seduced into vampirism. “By any means necessary.”
Nearly 300 years later in the English countryside, Charlotte lives an idyllic life enjoying nature and literature and the company of her childhood friend Jocelyn, whom she is in love with. But when her brother catches the two young women kissing, he arranges for Charlotte to be sent to London to become a proper lady and find a husband. Though she is bound in corsets and trapped in manors to wait for men to fill her dance card, she eventually finds excitement in a glamorous widow who takes the impressionable Charlotte under her wing, seduces her and changes her in more ways than one.
In 2019, Alice has chosen her own exile, leaving her small town in Scotland to attend Harvard University. Growing up, Alice was a shadow to her more feral sister, Catty, and now away at college, she wants to form her own independent identity. Alice seems to get her wish when she meets a beautiful, magical girl at a party. But after a dreamy one-night stand, Alice finds herself transformed in ways she hadn’t imagined possible — and didn’t agree to. Alice, confused and tortured by an insatiable hunger, goes in search of answers, and finds herself drawn into a centuries-old drama.
Schwab has impressively woven a compelling character drama and feminist critique into a horror thriller. But with so many moving parts and timelines, it’s inevitable that something has to suffer. I felt impatient every time we jaunted into Alice’s modern time, which is less enticing than the lesbian affairs that unfold in the other sections. The story lines eventually thread together, though not until well into the novel’s 500 pages. I found it well worth the wait, though, because of the sumptuous descriptions of place and time, and the slow-burn melodrama between each of the women.
Like many vampire novels, “Bury Our Bones” muses over what makes us human. Is it our relationship to death? Our friendships and familial ties? The place we were born and raised? These are connections that should enrich our lives, but in “Bury Our Bones,” family, friends and home are sources of pain. They come loaded with gendered expectations and constraints, and thus they bind María, Charlotte and Alice.
Vampirism is offered as reprieve from oppression. By becoming undead, these women gain bodily autonomy and societal agency. But their immortality also introduces new troubles — as vampires, they will always face the threat of their hunger and yearning calcifying into something as dangerous as the forces they wanted to escape.
It’s an apt story for our current culture: Decades of improved (but not equal) conditions for women in the United States have given way to the end of Roe v. Wade, a backlash against D.E.I. initiatives and a dystopian focus on women having children above all else. At the same time, 45 percent of American women voted for an administration that has pursued these limitations. The mommy versus child-free wars continue. We wonder if tradwives are bad. We are eating ourselves alive.
“Bury Our Bones” gets at this idiosyncratic feeling with a tale told sharply but sweetly enough it goes down as easy as that happy-hour cocktail that, surprisingly, knocks you flat.
BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL | By V.E. Schwab | Tor | 535 pp. | $29.99
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