V. E. Schwab has long occupied the upper echelon of modern fantasy, churning out instant bestsellers in both the adult and YA markets. Her latest adult fantasy novel, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for readers’ favorite fantasy. This was my first experience reading her work, and all I feel is disappointment — nothing about this book holds a candle to the monstrous reputation she’s cultivated in my mind.
Ostensibly, the novel follows three lesbian vampires whose stories begin in the early 16th century and come to a head in the 21st century. As their lives converge after ages of violence and longing, each woman sheds her humanity in exchange for immortality and an immortal hunger.
Though Schwab presents romance as the driving force behind the story, to call this book compelling for said romance is far too generous. It remains uncommitted to neither the romance nor the fantasy cause, hovering between the two without meaningfully combining or transcending their tropes.
“Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil” carries a narrative emptiness that permeates and sours everything slightly decent about the story — a second-screen sensibility, if you will. The second-screen concept refers to media that can be consumed amid distracting oneself on a secondary screen. Think of those intentionally shallow Netflix films that are watchable even as you doomscroll to satisfy your short attention span. We’re all guilty of this, myself included, but the last place a second screen belongs is in fantasy.
The death of fantasy comes when stories do not fully believe in themselves — because why, then, would a reader?
And this is the unfortunate truth of Schwab’s latest work. Despite the novel’s sprawling timeline, which promised gothic grandiosity, every chapter is so shallow as to never build on itself or on other chapters. You can drop in at any point in any character’s arc and not feel lost — the last thing a so-called fantasy story should allow. By the novel’s atrocious climax, any onus you might feel to read to the end feels completely obligatory. You’ve already flipped through 500 pages. What’s a disastrous 30 more?
Trite begets trite, and there is far, far too much telling and not enough showing on the level of prose. Schwab relies on trauma and “vibes” to insist her characters are interesting and, in doing so, fails to imprint the gravity and desolation of each character’s arc. Her prose is utilitarian to an egregious fault — surgically short sentences and fragments dominate without any visible authorial intent. Longer sentences are littered with whippy clauses and overdone metaphors that inspire neither emotional resonance nor attachment.
It is with this broad and technical shallowness that the novel’s treatment of queer relationships feels especially juvenile. There is a much richer story to be told about feminine beauty and longing, yet this one remains overly tainted and defined by men. By ultimately framing lesbian desire as emerging directly from female oppression and hatred toward men, the novel settles for a lazy reckoning with the patriarchy — something fantasy does not need more of. Not to mention, every male character is rendered cruel, brutish, or morally bankrupt, save for one inoffensive male vampire.
This is not to say that heterosexual relationships in fantasy are free from criticism; however, shortcomings should be acknowledged across all forms of representation for representation to be meaningful and for the genre to move forward. Schwab, who identifies as a lesbian, calls this the most autobiographical story she has written to date, which makes its emotional opacity all the more perplexing.
For a queer fantasy novel in this economy, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil” simply does not deliver.
Rating: ★★
