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

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a dark, hypnotic descent into obsession, grief, and queer desire. It doesn’t flirt with its themes—it commits to them fully, wrapping you in a story that’s as brutal as it is seductive. This isn’t a romance; it’s a study in longing that corrodes. A slow, inevitable collapse.

Schwab’s prose is sharp and lyrical, almost hallucinatory. Every sentence pulses with atmosphere, dread, and hunger. It reads like a dream you’re not sure you want to wake from—elegant and unsettling in equal measure. This is a story built on feeling, not plot, and that emotional weight holds everything together. You don’t turn the pages looking for twists; you keep going because it refuses to let go.

At its heart, this book explores three women at very different stages of vampirism, slowly circling each other in a narrative that spans centuries. Their connections are uneasy, layered in betrayal, longing, and violence. Schwab doesn’t shy away from showing how intimacy can become a weapon. The characters are flawed and often hard to root for, but that’s what makes them fascinating.

The pacing is deliberate. It drags you through time, mirrors the monotony and repetition of immortality. Some may find that tiring, and honestly, at times, I did too. There were stretches where the bloodshed and emotional spiraling began to blur—but that felt like part of the point. This is not meant to be easy reading.

The themes—loneliness, power, mortality, queer identity, rage—are all explored through a slow unraveling. The novel moves with a kind of fatalism, like everything has already happened and we’re just watching it all finally break apart.

The ending is quietly devastating. It doesn’t offer closure, only consequences.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil isn’t trying to charm you. It wants to ruin you—and in that, it succeeds.

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