Review - Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil by VE Schwab

Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil 

VE Schwab
Pan Macmillan, 10 June 2025
Available as: HB, pp, PB, 544pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035064649

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil to consider for review.

I don't think I can review Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil without dropping one potential spoiler - although it is a point I see mentioned in some of the author blurbs, so I think it's justified, if you want to go into this story in delightful ignorance of the central idea, stop reading now?

Still with me?

Well...

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is very much a vampire book. Across three timelines - one starting in 16th century Spain, the second in 19th century England and the third, present day Boston, MA, we see the workings of these ancient, corrupt creatures. It's actually often on familiar ground in its exploration of the idea, showing up the consequences for these long-lasting, but not immortal, monsters. The solitude. The loss of any possible human connection as mortals age and die. The need for secrecy. The ethical dilemma, when one's existence depends on taking human lives, and often. 

Where VE Schwab adds something of her own to the conceit is in her chosen monsters - or perhaps I should say victims. 

María is a peasant girl in medieval Spain. Blessed - or cursed - with good looks she seizes an opportunity to get out of grinding poverty and toil, but finds herself in an unfamiliar world without allies or friends. The life of a noblewoman is even more circumscribed than that of a poor girl. Can María repeat her trick and turn the table son the stuffy aristo who she's married?

Charlotte is a wealthy young woman in 19th century England. Like María, her only future seems to be a loveless marriage - until she meets a dazzling foreign contessa who awakes forbidden desire...

Finally, Alice, a young Scottish woman who's arrived to study at Harvard, has already made her move for escape, and has no wish to go any further, but she has little say in matters following a student party...

Each of these three stories is substantial and receives generous space in Schwab's novel, the book cutting back and forward. I don't always enjoy this device, the writer has to really know what they're doing but Schwab brings it off handsomely - with one "but...". This is the inevitable risk that any reader will enjoy one of the timelines more, or less, and resent some of the switches. For me, I found time spent with Alice a little frustrating. She wasn't a character I warmed to very quickly, and it didn't help that while the other two women's stories are more or less chronological, with Alice we get both her "now, in Boston" story and also callbacks to her previous life in her rural Scottish town and her difficult sister. The latter often interrupt the "now" timeline very abruptly and sometimes, very annoyingly. In particular I found Alice's sister, Catty, who these segments often dwell on, difficult.

Alice's dilemma in this book is - spoiler coming - that having been "turned" and (unlike the other two women) "turned" pretty much non consensually, she wants to work out what has happened to her and, if possible, get revenge. Alice is a new vampire, and that's a fairly simple motivation, unlike those of María and Charlotte, both of whom have spent long decades or even centuries becoming who they are. Alice's family history (fifteen years before, her mum died, her dad remarried, Alice is friendly with the new wife, Catty hates her and behaves in an increasingly bratty way) doesn't really affect that or bear on her current situation so these parts of the novel while I think insightful in terms of family dynamics, read as a distraction from the main story.

Which is a shame, because the main story is terrific! We see lots of gore. We see jealously. We see the tedium of a centuries-long existence. The loss of family and friends. The different vampires here cope with, or endure, this situation variously but with a consensus that there is a hollowing out process going on, robbing all, in the end, of their remaining humanity. (How to deal with that?)

Schwab also deftly portrays a rather vampire-specific, but immediately recognisable, strain of abuse and coercive control which, once you stop and think about it, absolutely fits with the situation. (Do bear this element of there story in mind if that's something that you might struggle with).

Above all this novel is superbly plotted, with the dance of her vampires across the centuries well choreographed to bring them together and ignite a final conflict with a few twists I absolutely hadn't anticipated. At the level of the writing itself, Schwab is always excellent of course and Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil is very, very readable.

So overall, I enjoyed Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil, and would recommend it, with the one caveat above.

For more information about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, see the publisher's website here.