Fans of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire have plenty of ways to sate their appetite for stories about sexy creatures of the night. The foundational work of vampire literature continued with 12 more novels, has been adapted into an excellent movie, and updated in a TV series with three seasons (and a fourth on the way). Many of Rice’s imitators also took her sympathetic monsters and sanitized them for YA romance.
Schwab’s 2025 novel Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil feels like a true spiritual successor, playing with the genre’s well-established themes and structure to create something beautifully original. Rice built The Vampire Chronicles on the backs of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, works where the undead defy societal and sexual norms. Interview with the Vampire is a messy, queer love story, with an unreliable narrator sharing centuries of relationship drama.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil provides three unreliable narrators who all lie to themselves and each other as their stories intertwine across the centuries. Schwab conceals their motivations and key parts of their history to tease the reader as she jumps back and forth in time, introducing the effects of a character’s mistake long before the cause becomes clear. Time is relative for an immortal, and Schwab regularly changes the pace of her narrative.
She dwells longest on Maria, a girl growing up in 16th century Spain, where the only path before her is to get married and have children. Even though Maria works to find the best match possible that will elevate her social status, she's still trapped with a boorish husband and in-laws whose flaws range from darkly funny to truly vile. (Her mother-in-law is a cranky gossip; her father-in-law tries to sexually assault her.) When a mysterious widow offers Maria the chance to change her fate, she sheds her old life to become a “feral rose,” the book’s poetic name for vampires. Maria’s journey follows some of the same story beats as Interview with the Vampire, dwelling on the heavy weight of loneliness juxtaposed with the terrible danger of letting yourself get too close to others.
As she learns the rules of her new existence, Schwab slowly unveils her fresh spin on vampire mythology. Beyond explaining what can actually kill vampires, Schwab comes up with clever twists on what undead life is like for them. Their hunger is eternal, and as the decades and centuries pass, bits of their humanity fall away, leaving only empty monsters behind.
That inevitability gives a dark weight to the relationships vampires have with each other. There's a lurking fear that they will lose themselves and hurt the people they love, or have to be the responsible partner to stop the monster their companion has become. It’s an inherently toxic dynamic, and like in Interview with the Vampire, much of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is devoted to twisted obsessions and people who would be much better off if they could just agree to an amicable breakup.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
