For Charlotte, escape from Regency London’s unwanted balls and suitors comes with a poisoned offer of a new life: she must become a vampire, just as Maria does. Her storyline in V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is the book’s most entertaining stretch, according to Polygon’s review, which likens the Regency London plot to Bridgerton with Lady Danbury secretly a vampire.
Freedom carries a cost throughout V.E. Schwab’s 2025 novel. Its three central women can fight people who would control them, yet their newfound strength offers no protection from destructive relationships. Polygon sees a spiritual successor to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire: a book that reshapes familiar vampire themes and storytelling into something beautifully original rather than making its monsters safer romantic prospects.
Schwab dwells longest on Maria, a girl growing up in 16th-century Spain, where the only path before her is to marry and have children. She searches for a husband who will give her the best chance of climbing the social ladder, but she’s still trapped with a boorish husband and his parents, whose troubles range from dark comedy to outright horror. His mother is an ill-tempered gossip; his father attempts to sexually assault Maria.
Then a mysterious widow offers Maria a chance to change her fate. Accepting her offer, Maria leaves her former life behind and becomes a “feral rose,” the book’s poetic name for a vampire.
Alice doesn’t get the same opportunity to choose. Shy and running from family trauma, the Harvard college student wants to start over. Instead, she wakes after a one-night stand to discover she’s a vampire. She must work out what happened, what it means, and who’s to blame.
The three narratives run at strikingly different speeds: a page can carry Maria or Charlotte through decades, while Alice’s 21st-century plot occupies only a few very eventful days. Across their intertwined centuries, all three unreliable narrators deceive themselves as well as each other. Schwab teases readers by withholding motives and crucial history, moving between periods so they encounter the damage from a mistake before learning what caused it.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil breathes new life into the vampire romance genre
Charlotte, Maria, and Alice are all lesbians. The conventions of their times make it especially hard for Maria and Charlotte to fit in, though Schwab also takes Alice’s present-day difficulties seriously. Polygon reads their resistance to social norms in two ways: these women challenge sexual conventions, and they have the power to fight back against men who see them as prey.
The possibility of physical and sexual violence never disappears. Becoming vampires gives the women a perverse kind of power over that threat: they can turn predator and choose whose death is deserved, or whose absence will go unnoticed.
Maria’s journey follows some of the same story beats as Interview with the Vampire, especially the conflict between unbearable solitude and the danger of letting someone too close. Her education in vampirism also introduces Schwab’s inventive variations on the mythology, including what can kill the undead. Death isn’t their only danger. Hunger never ends, and as decades and centuries pass, parts of their humanity fall away, leaving empty monsters.
“It turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full,” one vampire explains to her human companion.
For lovers, that gradual erosion creates two frightening possibilities: losing themselves and harming the people they love, or having to restrain a partner who has become monstrous. Polygon describes these relationships as inherently toxic. As in Interview with the Vampire, twisted obsessions consume much of the story, binding together people whose lives would improve if they could part amicably.
Schwab crafts a beautiful world full of horrors
Polygon praises the richness of Schwab’s prose in both her passionate sex scenes and her descriptions of vampire-haunted cities. A visit to Venice involving a much older vampire is beautiful and heartbreaking, confronting the eventual end of good things and the difficulty of finding anything to replace them.
Rice’s influence extends beyond troubled immortal romances. The Vampire Chronicles draws on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, both works in which the undead defy societal and sexual norms. In Polygon’s account, Interview with the Vampire turns that tradition into a messy, queer love story: an unreliable narrator relates centuries of relationship drama.
Image: Warner Bros.
That foundational novel was followed by 12 more novels, an excellent film adaptation in Polygon’s estimation, and a television update with three seasons and a fourth on the way. The review faults many writers who followed Rice for turning her sympathetic monsters into sanitized young-adult romantic leads. Schwab preserves the danger alongside the sympathy.
Storytelling itself connects the two novels. There’s no literal interview framing Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, but its vampires still shape what others hear through teary confessions, outright lies, and clever omissions. Their accounts serve both to manipulate one another and to help them live with themselves.
The vampires also repeatedly change their stories, taking agency over their lives rather than remaining supporting characters in someone else’s tale. Polygon places the novel within a long legacy of vampire literature, crediting Schwab with bringing fresh life to the genre and crafting a story fans will want to read.
