Bingo Square: B – Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
V.E. Schwab has created another enjoyable stand alone novel with Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. It’s about hunger, love, and rage. Starting in 1532 Spain and concluding in 2019 Boston, Massachusetts. Three women, across time become inextricably linked and, in Schwab’s words, this is their “toxic, lesbian vampire story”.
Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.
We meet Maria as a girl in rural 1532 Spain. She always hungered for more than the meager life offered in the village and so she sets out to marry a wealthy man who will take her away. Married life turns into a cage worse than her childhood and Maria chafes at the constraints society binds her in. When presented with the opportunity to take control of her life, to live as she pleases, she grasps the chance and savagely takes it. In doing so she becomes the vampire Sabine.
Early in life Sabine learns how her kind can be killed through external forces but that they also can rot from within. Over time bits of humanity are steadily chipped away. Live long enough and that loss of humanity becomes pronounced causing a more reckless and feral personality to emerge.
Over the next three hundred years, Sabine learns the fullness of her power and how to hide within society. Through that time Sabine has occasionally been a friend with other vampires but has mostly preferred to be alone. In the early 1800s she decides she would like a companion of her own and in the London season finds Charlotte (Lottie) among the ton. Lottie with a heart on her sleeve and looking for forbidden love with a woman. Sabine sweeps Lottie off her feet and changes her.
Which brings us to 2019 and Alice. A girl from rural Scotland come to college in America and the start of a new life. A life that is cut off before it can even begin and rage sets in. The last thing Alice remembers is leaving a party, taking a stunning girl back to her dorm room and waking to find herself dead.
The story weaves back and forth between the three woman. The book starts with Maria/Sabine before her turning and immediately pivots to Alice in present day. The first half of the book moves between them. Sabine growing as a vampire and Alice hunting, determined to get answers and revenge. Once Sabine meets Lottie, Lottie’s chapters enter story rotation. While the story is always moving forward it is peppered with recurring lengthy flashbacks. Sometime around 2/3rds or so of the way through the book it felt a little draggy with all the flashbacks. I particularly started wondering why we needed so much of Alice’s backstory. However it picked up in the last quarter and I raced to the finish.
I like Schwab’s take on vampires as she picked which canonical details to include and exclude. Schwab’s particular twist on the genre is that grave dirt calls to their dead bodies and renders them nearly paralyzed as they collapse to the ground. I wanted to love this as much as The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue but it didn’t quite hit the mark. I feel it got a bit mired in flashbacks. However, overall this was a fun read. I love Schwab’s way with words and this is a creative vampire tale.