“It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.”
Toxic lesbian vampires. That’s how V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (2025 Tor) was marketed. And it’s not wrong. But it’s also woefully inadequate. As someone who spent many a night in the 90s reading Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, this novel gave me something I haven’t had in ages. Twilight it is not – and that’s a good thing. With the slow burn pacing of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is bloody and wicked, morally grey characters wink and nudge and bite and tug at you. Sabine, Lottie, and Alice are perfectly imperfect feral roses, in various stages of rot, and I loved the way this novel made me feel – tickling the recollections from my youth with also the whispers of Addie. Schwab can weave a wicked tale – and that slow burn pacing can still leave one breathless with a quickening pulse.
The novel, which jumps in time and space, follows Sabine (turned in 1532), Lottie (turned in 1827), and Alice (turned in 2019) from Spain to Italy to England to the United States, with centuries of blood and bodies and brokenness in their wake. They all have a hunger that cannot be satiated; and it’s just as much a bloodthirst as a longing for love that gnaws at them. Alice, newly turned, is a bit of a pawn in a game of cat and mouse between Lottie and Sabine that has been going on in earnest since 1943. Theirs is indeed one of toxicity.
I hated Sabine, but I loved her before she turned. I wanted more Lottie – more of the obsession and not the chase. (Lottie is unreliable. She gets her thrills too, don’t let her convince you she doesn’t.) And Alice – the girl who tastes like grief before she’s turned and winter once she blooms – her character hiccups along initially and I found some actions a bit out of character, but by the end, she is indeed born of both Sabine and Lottie. (And I’m still not sure how I feel about that.)
In short, it’s a quick read with an intoxicatingly savoring pace. Anne Rice would have loved this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 