A review by Connie Hawley
Having already dipped a toe into the works of V. E. Schwab with This Savage Song (2016) I went into the world of Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil with high hopes, and was not disappointed. At over 500 pages this is not a short novel, but despite my unfortunate propensity to be intimidated by big books, I think it could have been 200 pages longer and I would have happily read on.
It’s no secret that the vampire novel has been done and the vampire romance novel has been done and done again, but Schwab’s take on the toxic lesbian vampire romance and revenge tale manages to find new perspectives in a genre that one might assume to have been wrung dry.
It’s romantic, there are three main characters… and it isn’t a typical love triangle? I’m shocked. I’m intrigued. And honestly it delivered. The book focuses on Maria, Charlotte and Alice, three sapphic women from different points in history whose lives become intertwined when each of them encounters a vampire.
What I found especially engaging was the staggered introduction of characters, the plot isn’t entirely linear and new perspectives are added one at a time. Schwab, though, executes this perfectly – it isn’t at all difficult to follow and I didn’t find myself enjoying only one narrator and finding others less fleshed out. This structure also works especially well to paint a picture of the truly dysfunctional and at times downright toxic relationships; when you know what everyone is thinking first hand, you can see when nobody is really the good guy. The characters themselves were also very well developed and we were given insight into how their individual experiences informed the choices they would make years later.
Vampires and lesbians have gone hand in hand for a long time, even with vampirism being used as a metaphor for the taboo of same-sex attraction in works like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but this interpretation is fascinating in that even though much of the plot takes place during a time period where lesbian romances were not acceptable to society, both the characters’ sexuality and their nature as vampires, were attributes to be separately concealed, in very different ways. Schwab makes vampirism almost an escape from society and a ticket to freedom from lesbian oppression, giving characters the chance to love without fear in an era where such a thing was unthinkable. Unfortunately, we quickly discover that this free life comes with its downsides.
The incorporation of vampires as a plot device was done skilfully, these aren’t sparkly ‘vegetarian’ vampires – the ones that Schwab creates are real monsters who all cause harm and countless deaths without exception. Again, there is no good guy in this book, not really. But that’s the charm of it, it feels much more believable than any other vampire fantasy I’ve come across, the book feels like an idea of what might take place should the concept of vampires truly exist in the real world with real flawed people.
V. E. Schwab’s toxic lesbian vampire novel is a must read for fans of sapphic and vampire literature alike.
Juxtabook 
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