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.

#SocialMediaBlast #Review - Bleeding Hearts by Ry Herman

Bleeding Hearts
Ry Herman
Jo Fletcher Books, 10 June 2021
Available as: PB, 414pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781529406313

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher books for an advance copy of Bleeding Hearts and for inviting me to take part in the social media blast.

It was great to return to Ry Herman's Boston and to meet Angela and Chloë, introduced in Love Bites, again. Angela, you may recall, is a vampire, and Chloë a witch, and they are deeply in love. But there is a problem - Angela is desperately afraid that she will take too much from Chloë and she has allowed a year for them to find a way for Chloë not to end up undead. Or even, dead. Now there are only two months left before some hard facts need to be faced...

I love the way that, in these two books, Herman centres the love between two supernaturally blessed (or cursed?) young women and the ups and downs of their relationship. Angela's belief, in particular, that there may be no way for her safely to feed from Chloë threatens to break them up. Without Chloë, Angela would be faced by a choice between starving, and going back to picking up strangers in bars and clubs to feed from. Issues of consent are never far away, Angela recalling the abuse she suffered from Tess, her ex, who made her into a vampire, and Herman showing us an another model for vampirism. This is in a story strand beginning in San Francisco just before the earthquake of 1906 where Meijing, who has been trafficked and abused, falls into the company of Master Hiram, an even more ruthless vampire than Tess - and one with a dash of religious fervour to him. 

As Chloë digs deep into ancient legend and magical practice to find an answer to Angela's fears (and more fundamentally, a way that she can make an acceptable life with a person who can only emerge when it's dark), Angela wonders if she might not find answers with Tess after all. It's a mark of just how much Herman makes the reader feel for his characters that as the tension between them over this trip rises (Chloë wants to go along, fearful of losing Angela, while Angela resists that, knowing how dangerous Tess might be to the woman she  sees as having stolen her lover) I almost didn't want to turn the next page from concern that one or the other would go too far, say just too much, from a mixture of love and fear and provoke a split.

Almost. This is a compelling and involving fantasy romance, and I HAD to turn that page. 

And the next. 

And the next. 

Angela's quest takes her physically further and further from Boston, and Chloë's... well... it's hard to describe. Further spiritually? Or mythically? Chloë seems to find herself travelling into a weird realm that blends the symbolism of Boston's past with that of myth and story, a sort of Otherworld - and we know don't we, that the Otherworld is perilous place? Both women face dangers, in a story set in those weeks of later 2000 when a US election was decided by "hanging chads" and politicised legal cases - a setting with echoes, of course, twenty years later.

I love the way that in this book Herman gives us a deft fantasy blending vampirism, lycanththropy and witchcraft while not shying away from the more incongruous aspects of that (Angela, an astrophysicist, is in despair at the logical contradictions - what would happen if werewolf Mike were to visit a lane with no moon? Where does the mass-energy come from (an go) when he transforms?)

I love the way he also gives us a complex modern romance, one that requires supernatural issues to be faced in the same breath as more conventional relationship problems (and which combines the two creating some really knotty life difficulties).

But above all I love the way he grounds this in a response to and depiction of some of the darker parts of reality: in the desire Angela and Chloë have to live their lives like any other couple, despite political trends that want to deny them that, or in the prejudice faces by Meijing through nearly a century. It's a very affirming book, with people, in their diversity, finding a way despite human - or supernatural - obstacles to express their love.

For more information about Bleeding Hearts, see the publisher's website here - and the other reviewers joining in the blast, on the poster below.

You can buy Bleeding Hearts from your local bookshop (but hurry, before they all go!) or online from UK Bookshop dot org, or Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Hinterland by LM Brown

Cover image: “Roses on Red Chair”
© Kathy Bradshaw

Hinterland
LM Brown
Fomite Press, 13 October 2020
Available as: PB, 324pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781947917583

I'm grateful to the author for an advance e-copy of Hinterland to consider for review.

Hinterland is an intense, closely observed study of one family living in a Boston suburb over a decade or so in the early 2000s.

We meet Nicholas ‍Giovanni, a taxi driver, whose main focus in life is the protection of his young daughter, Kate. When first introduced, he is sneaking away from his nightshift and back into the house while baby Kate and her mother Kathleen sleep, to check that all is well with Kate. A devoted father, or just this side of creepy? 

Kathleen herself is a troubled woman - how much so we'll only slowly discover - who is riled when Ina moves back in next door. Ina's mother Tilly has had a fall (Nicholas discovered her in the snow in her back garden) and Ina has returned to look after her. Nicholas, Tilly and Ina know each other well (Nicholas is still living in his childhood home, he and Ina grew up together) - and it's soon clear there is history here ('it had been hard to be in the same room as Ina'). What, exactly, and what sort, you need to discover for yourself - Brown will reveal this slowly as the months and years move forward and a catastrophe strikes Nicholas's little family, leaving him to care for Kate alone (alone, with help from Ida).

The characters will grow on you. Nicholas is always uneasy, trying to control everything, especially Kate (for example, he's unwilling to let her go to the playground alone, following her even when she tells him not to). At one point we are told of Nicholas that 'It was impossible to know exactly how to feel', as though he is an actor on stage waiting for direction. 

Kate misses her mother ('She wondered constantly where her mother was, if she had fallen and hurt herself, if she had forgotten where she lived...'), aware of a great absence that nobody will talk about. Nicholas won't be frank with Kate about the thing that has happened - understandably, you might think, but it leaves Kate so wounded and he refuses to do the one thing that might set things right. Why, we can only speculate.

And Ina, Nichola's sister-in-law, who seems part of, and not part of, this odd family, helping out, but resented, resenting. There is, as I said, history here - and secrets to be revealed - with Ina's and Nicholas's relationship now playing out a pattern that's rooted in events of twenty years before. The tension that Brown sketches between the two is electric, one almost feels the words crackle as one reads them, and there is a sense in which everyone else in the book - even Kate - is in their shadow, having to work round them, make space for them, if unconsciously. So Kate and, for example, Nicholas's brother Stefano and son Cooper, when they turn up, are all puzzled, stepping round in a dance they don't comprehend to accommodate Nicholas and Ina. 

It's a dance that Kathleen never learned to perform: so early on, she has to leave the stage and this fascinating woman is mostly seen in glimpses, memories, the reports of interested parties and experts. She's always interpreted by others, analysed, argued over. Yet even in her absence Kate seems to have a bond with her and a major theme of the book is Kate's quest for her mother, a quest that's sometimes overt but sometimes hidden even from her. An inevitably that quest opens up a rift with Nicholas, who's so wound up in keeping the truth from his daughter that he seems almost stop knowing her, his understanding of her personality drifting from that seen by everyone else ('he never thought that Kate could be a completely different person outside her house.')

That does give the book a vein of melancholy, but it's never maudlin. And Brown's characters are complex and real enough that - while one may not like all of them - one comes to understand them and want the best for them (even Nicholas, who, as I have said, does sometimes exhibit a worrying degree of obsession and control).

I would recommend Hinterland, both to readers of Brown's previous stories - for example her collections Treading the Uneven Road ‍and ‍Were We Awake - and those who are new to her writing. 

For more information about Hinterland, see the publisher's website here. You can purchase the book from Amazon here.