Breakaway Books

Authored by V.E. Schwab; Published June 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a vampire story. But don’t be fooled—this isn’t a romantasy jaunt but rather a long-form meditation on the value of life and the soul.

Maria, Charlotte and Alice all have one thing in common: They are the living dead, turned vampire in the prime of their lives. Centuries apart, their stories are interwoven with each other’s, their deaths intimately connected far more than their lives. Maria is a Spanish peasant living in the 1500s who tricks her way into a noble marriage and gets something far worse than she expected. Charlotte is banished from her English country home in the nineteenth century for a dalliance with another young lady and is languishing in the London season. And Alice has finally escaped her Scottish family in 2019 and is ready to start a new life at Harvard. But all of them must learn to cope with the curse of living as a vampire when they are turned.

This is the third novel of Schwab’s that I have read, and there is a darkness to it that reminds me of Vicious. Similar to that novel, there are no true good guys here—although Charlotte and Maria are clearly set against each other as advocates of opposing philosophies, neither acts purely and honestly, and both use other women to accomplish their goals. Centuries of backstory help the reader to understand how they became what they are, but there is still a strange dissonance between their actions and their personalities, particularly in Maria’s case. Throughout her unnaturally long life, she has learned much from the fates of other vampires, and yet, she seems to discard it all in favor of pure vengeance. Charlotte, on the other hand, maintains the ability to love deeply but still resorts to violence despite her natural gentleness, a baffling turn. The author explains this phenomenon through the natural rot of compassionate humanity that vampires are said to experience over the centuries, but even with the clarification, the two seemed to be much flatter characters than I would have hoped because of their inevitable turn to brutality.

Maria and Charlotte are each longing for freedom in their lives—the freedom not to wed, as society tells them they must do. Becoming a vampire to attain this freedom, at first, seemed a little extreme to me, but in their eras, what other choice do they have? Is there any other way for them to live safely, especially to live safely and in relationship with other women? When granted this freedom as vampires, they manage to demonstrate the very worst that a toxic relationship can be. (Granted, even the worst toxic relationships usually don’t reach the depths of vampiric wrath. There’s not quite so much sociopathic homicide.) The possessiveness and jealousy on display from both women feels much more real (and painful) than their supernatural violent outbursts. This kernel of realism conveyed in their relationship may be the most depressing portion of the entire novel. 

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a darker tale than you might be expecting from a vampire story. But if you want to ruminate on the value of long life and just how badly relationships can go, this is for you.