V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a sensual, unsettling vampire novel that honours the genre’s traditions while giving them a strikingly original shape.
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire helped establish a powerful template for modern vampire fiction: sympathetic monsters, queer desire, unreliable confession and centuries of complicated relationship drama. Rice continued that world with 12 further novels, while the story also became a celebrated film and a television series with three seasons and a fourth on the way. Numerous later books softened similar ideas into young-adult romance, but Schwab’s 2025 novel feels less like an imitation and more like a genuine spiritual successor.
Rice drew on earlier works including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, where the undead challenge social and sexual conventions. Schwab takes that legacy and divides the narration between three women, each unreliable in a different way. Maria, Charlotte and Alice conceal facts from one another, deceive themselves and gradually reveal how their lives connect across centuries.
The novel’s shifting chronology is central to its suspense. Schwab may show the consequence of a decision long before explaining what caused it, then move backwards and forwards through time to reshape the reader’s understanding. For immortal characters, decades can pass in a sentence, while a few human days can carry enormous weight.
Maria’s escape creates a new kind of prison
The story spends the most time with Maria, a girl growing up in 16th-century Spain. Her expected future is marriage and motherhood, so she carefully pursues a match that might improve her social standing. Instead, she becomes trapped with a dull husband and an appalling family: her mother-in-law is a spiteful gossip, while her father-in-law attempts to sexually assault her.
A mysterious widow offers Maria another possibility. By accepting, she abandons her former life and becomes what the book poetically calls a “feral rose”. Her transformation echoes some of the emotional territory of Interview with the Vampire: immortality promises freedom, but it also brings profound loneliness and the danger of becoming too dependent on another person.
Schwab gradually establishes her own vampire mythology. The creatures have an unending appetite, and the passage of decades strips away pieces of their humanity. Eventually, the undead risk becoming hollow predators. One vampire explains that the soul is what allows the sun to feel warm, food to have flavour and the body to feel satisfied.
That loss gives every vampire relationship a grim sense of inevitability. Lovers fear that one of them will become a monster, while the other may be forced to intervene. The result is an inherently unhealthy dynamic built from obsession, control and the fear of losing someone who has already begun to disappear. Like Rice’s most troubled romances, the novel often follows people who would be safer apart but cannot bring themselves to leave.
A sumptuous world of cities, parties and danger
Schwab’s prose is richly atmospheric, whether she is describing sex, violence or the cities where her vampires hide. A visit to Venice with a much older vampire becomes a beautiful and painful meditation on endings, grief and the difficulty of replacing what has been lost.
The book takes a more playful turn in Regency London. Its central setup resembles Bridgerton with a secret vampire presence, almost as though Lady Danbury were concealing an immortal identity. Charlotte is pushed towards balls, suitors and social expectations she rejects. There, she receives the same dangerous offer of an altered life that once reached Maria.
Maria and Charlotte’s stories can leap across decades within a single page. Alice’s section operates differently. A shy Harvard student trying to escape family trauma hopes a new start will give her control over her life. Instead, following a one-night stand, she wakes as a vampire and has only a few frantic days to discover what happened, what her transformation means and who is responsible.
All three women are lesbians. The social rules of their eras make life especially restrictive for Maria and Charlotte, but Alice also faces the lasting consequences of family trauma and violence. Their vampirism allows them to defy expectations not only through their sexuality, but through physical power over men who have treated women as prey.
That power remains deeply troubling. The threat of physical and sexual violence never vanishes, and becoming a vampire can mean becoming the predator. Each woman must decide who deserves to die, who can be protected and whose disappearance will go unnoticed.
Stories, secrets and the freedom to rewrite a life
Both Interview with the Vampire and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil are concerned with the stories people tell about themselves. Schwab does not use a literal interview framework, but her novel is packed with confessions, omissions and carefully constructed lies. The vampires manipulate one another while trying to survive their own memories.
They also revise their accounts repeatedly, taking control of narratives in which they might otherwise be reduced to supporting characters. That self-conscious structure lets Schwab engage with the long history of vampire literature without being trapped by it. The result is a dark, romantic and frequently brutal novel that gives the genre fresh blood.
For readers who enjoy the visual drama of horror and gothic game design, RETROCADE’s arcade blog offers more gaming-focused features, while arcade videos explore the atmosphere of classic machines. If you are building a themed games room, the arcade machine buying guide is a useful place to start.
Leave a Reply