Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: Ambitious, atmospheric, and ultimately uneven

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

I was a huge fan of V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (and much of her other work as well) and so was excited to see her new book, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, was seemingly a bit similar. Unfortunately, while the writing on a sentence level remains strong, and there’s a lot of strong elements, I ended up somewhat disappointed with the tale. Some inevitable minor spoilers follow, but nothing more than appears on the page of a number of booksellers.

The novel covers a wide swathe of time via its three narrators. We first meet Maria in the 1500s, jump to Alice in 2019, briefly meet the third narrator, Lottie/Charlotte in the same year and then, an extensive time later, we meet her more fully in the 1800s. This being (and here is the first minor spoiler so stop here if you want to know absolutely nothing about this book) a vampire novel, all three women are turned and thus Maria and Alice are able to move through the centuries after their births and be co-existent with Alice, allowing their stories to converge.

While this is a vampire novel, you might not know that early on, as Maria’s first few hundred pages read more like a well-done historical novel. At first, it seems as if Maria may be your stereotypical 16^th century woman — powerless as she moves through a man’s world, especially when she arrives home one day to find she is to be wed to an older, albeit wealthy, man. But there is a hidden side to Maria:

She is many things — stubborn, cunning, selfish — but she has never been a fool. She knows that she was born in this body. She knows it comes with certain rules … But she is not meant for common paths … If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

This seemingly surprise marriage proposal was orchestrated by Maria, and it’s the beginning of a pattern we will see in her many years: an adamant sense of independence, a strong tendency toward manipulation, and a viewpoint that views (most) other people with disdain and indifference. She is a predator above all else, one whose hunger is never seemingly sated. Alice, meanwhile, could hardly be more different: burdened by a slowly revealed backstory of some sort of trauma or grief, racked by anxiety and lack of self-esteem, and aching for a fresh start. And finally there is Charlotte, desperate for love, particularly after she is sent away from home after her brother witnesses her kiss her friend and first love Jocelyn. Her desperation leaves her vulnerable to a lengthy toxic relationship, and while she is able to escape, her good-heartedness means she feels she cannot love or turn anyone else.

Though relationships play a major role and drive much of the action, this is not a romance novel.

Relationships are often toxic, tainted by possessiveness & selfishness. It’s a horror novel not just via graphic physical violence but emotional violence as well, all while presenting society itself as a horror setting thru the violence done to women’s autonomy, a theme we see throughout, whether it’s Maria in an arranged marriage, Charlotte being peremptorily shipped off by her brother who rules her life more than she does, or Alice noting how women cannot walk the streets without being accosted (or worse) or, at a minimum, the fear of it.

I liked the fact that Schwab gives Maria power to somewhat (not totally) evade those strictures but then shows her going down the darkest of paths with that power. She is a woman angered by the restrictions put upon her and Schwab lets her enact that anger down through the centuries in appalling fashion. And we see that to a lesser extent with the others as well. And of course, along with the theme of women’s power or lack of it, with all three characters being gay, it’s easy enough to read hiding one’s true self as a vampire as an analogy to queerness and what that burying of oneself might reverberate. And the way some people recoil from queers just as they would from a vampire. As Schwab makes overt when one character spits out to Alice, “I’m not a dyke.” And then

V.E. Schwab

Alice remembers the first time a boy called her that … the sting of it like a slap … Alice feels her face go hot again, but this time it isn’t shame. It’s rage. Rage, at all the Hannahs of the world, convinced the worst thing a girl like Alice can feel is want, and this particular Hannah, for looking at Alice and seeing a monster, just not the one she thinks.

That rage is one of the positives, if one can call it that, in the novel — that the women and queer characters are allowed to be angry, as well as evil, messy, violent. In other words, they’re given the same freedom to be completely awful as male/straight characters often are.

As for the reasons I was disappointed in the book… One is that it felt its entire length and more. It bogged down in places and felt like it could have been cut. In a related note, Alice’s back story, which is lengthy and doled out a little at a time only to end in a place that seemed utterly predictable (I had in fact predicted it sometime earlier), felt like it contributed little to the story. Had the entire storyline been cut I wouldn’t have missed it, and I think the streamlining would have benefited the other plots, as well as perhaps given the ending a bit more time to breathe and develop. I’m guessing had Alice’s backstory been cut, I’d have given this a strong 4. As it is, I’ll stick to the three and a half stars and a qualified recommendation.