A Thrilling Lesbian Vampire Novel You'll Want to Sink Your Teeth Into

New York Times

10-06-2025

BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL, by V.E. Schwab
I don't think I'll ever tire of vampires. I do, however, have my preferences. I like my vampires to be old and sexy and inhuman. I like when their immortality is still a kind of death. To me, a vampire should be a little miserable. Living forever sounds awesome until you remember that living is a long slog of repeated maintenance tasks. What is life but a continuous search for sustenance and then dealing with the aftermath of your consumption?
So I was pleased by the vampires in V.E. Schwab's new novel, 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.' They are very hungry, and very mad about it.
The novel follows three women across three different timelines. In 1530s Spain, María chafes at her family's control over her life. She's a wild child with red hair so bright that no dye or mud they use can cover it. María doesn't want to get married or have children, as is expected of women of her time, but figures if she must, it should take her away from her small-minded family. She engineers her own marriage to a rich viscount in a bid for freedom, but finds herself bound further by his domineering nature. She's eventually shipped off to her in-laws, held as a vessel for her husband to impregnate. Her only escape is visits to a mysterious, ageless widow who runs an apothecary. 'I want to be free,' María says, as she is finally seduced into vampirism. 'By any means necessary.'
Nearly 300 years later in the English countryside, Charlotte lives an idyllic life enjoying nature and literature and the company of her childhood friend Jocelyn, whom she is in love with. But when her brother catches the two young women kissing, he arranges for Charlotte to be sent to London to become a proper lady and find a husband. Though she is bound in corsets and trapped in manors to wait for men to fill her dance card, she eventually finds excitement in a glamorous widow who takes the impressionable Charlotte under her wing, seduces her and changes her in more ways than one.
In 2019, Alice has chosen her own exile, leaving her small town in Scotland to attend Harvard University. Growing up, Alice was a shadow to her more feral sister, Catty, and now away at college, she wants to form her own independent identity. Alice seems to get her wish when she meets a beautiful, magical girl at a party. But after a dreamy one-night stand, Alice finds herself transformed in ways she hadn't imagined possible — and didn't agree to. Alice, confused and tortured by an insatiable hunger, goes in search of answers, and finds herself drawn into a centuries-old drama.
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