Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by V.E. Schwab
What they couldn’t have in life, they took in death.
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Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
V.E. Schwab
Gothic Fantasy
533
June 10, 2025
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The Quick Look
V.E. Schwab delivers a haunting, poetic masterpiece in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. This standalone sapphic gothic fantasy weaves the stories of Maria, Charlotte, and Alice—three women from different eras bound by blood, desire, and the fight to live freely in a world that demands their submission. It’s a tale of autonomy, consequence, and craving—both literal and metaphorical.
- Themes: Autonomy, hunger, queerness, societal expectation, choice & consequence.
- Read if you like: Feminist horror, vampire mythology, lush prose, or stories that ask what freedom really costs.
- Best for: Readers craving character-driven gothic tales that ache with beauty and sorrow.
- Skip if: You want a plot-driven page-turner without slow burn or introspection. Or, better yet… don’t!
The Full Review
PLOT & PACING
Told across many centuries, the story follows Maria, Charlotte, and Alice, women bound not by time but by shared defiance. Each faces a life marked by isolation, repression, and a yearning for more. Their paths twist through love, trauma, death, and rebirth as they embrace a dark power that offers freedom at a terrible cost. The pacing is deliberate, steeped in gothic atmosphere and internal reckoning, and the threads tie together in a devastatingly satisfying finale.
CHARACTER & VOICE
Maria is fire and fury. Charlotte is longing and love. Alice is ache and grief. Schwab renders each woman with astonishing clarity and emotional depth. Even the secondary characters shine. But it’s the intimacy of each voice—their rage, tenderness, defiance—that makes this story so arresting. These women feel real, like friends you grieve for long after the final page.
STYLE & ATMOSPHERE
This is Schwab at her most lyrical. Her writing lingers on the tongue like a spell: lush, intimate, aching. The gothic settings are thick with dread and wonder—from Spanish manors and grand Venetian houses to lavish English mansions and even Boston Common. Darkness pervades, but so does fierce light. The atmosphere doesn’t just haunt—it devours.
THEMES & DEPTH
Bury Our Bones is about the price of freedom. It’s about hunger—sexual, emotional, existential—and the power of reclaiming your story. Vampirism here isn’t just bloodlust—it’s metaphor. It’s survival. It’s defiance. Schwab unearths the rot beneath patriarchal structures and dares her characters to burn it all down.
PERSONAL TAKE
This novel gutted us—in the best way. Jenni said she was left starving for more. For Drew, it was a masterclass in character, metaphor, and social commentary. Schwab reminds us that living fully, fiercely, freely often comes at a cost—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.
The Final Verdict
Dark, dazzling, and unflinchingly bold—Schwab’s latest is a centuries-spanning reckoning with who we’re told to be, and the fierce, burning hunger to become something more.
