My thoughts on Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil features three vampire protagonists: Sabine, Lottie, and Alice. One of them is a sympathetic character, but she's mostly used as a vehicle to explore the relationship between the other two. The other two are villains. They are difficult to route for. If they have redeeming qualities at first, it doesn't last. Part of the lore is that vampires eventually lose their humanity, becoming immoral, predatory, and remorseless over the course of their very long lives. If they ever express righteous feminine or queer rage, it quickly turns into violence targeted at innocent victims. These victims are almost exclusively lesbian or queer women, many of whom are nameless and faceless. The narrative features almost no lashing out against patriarchy, even though every character has suffered under it. This story is about abusive and complicit characters. It's about the cycles of violence. It's not about identifying the true villains responsible for these cycles. The book mostly assumes that all readers know that the intersecting systems of things like patriarchy, queerphobia, and classicism are the real monsters. It's uninterested in proving it. It's uninterested in treating those systems like cathartic punching bags.
In short, the book opts not to delve directly into the misguidedness of society's fear of sexual deviance. The book instead delves directly into the queer community's own fears: What if society is right to be afraid? What if queer people really are monsters? What if lesbians deserve to be othered? What if giving them power would only cause them to unleash their rage --whether earned or not -- on those who deserve it least?
This type of story comes with serious risks. Queer people aren't exactly demanding to be portrayed as sexual predators. Women aren't demanding to be portrayed nameless victims of sexual violence. I can't speak for all queer women, but I personally think V.E. Schwab should be aware that this book perpetuates dangerous tropes and stereotypes.
As a caveat, I should say that I believe if people want to practice hate against lesbians, they are (unfortunately) going to do so, no matter what kind of sapphic stories are getting published. Bad-faith readers, if they read at all, engage with all books as a way of seeking evidence that reaffirms their preexisting worldviews, never leaving space to question their own rigid ideologies. Schwab -- and any other author -- should be free to write for the best-faith reader, including for queer people whose fears might feel validated or acknowledged when engaging with a book like Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. It's probably not a good thing for any piece of literature to validate internalized (or externalized) queerphobia, but it's okay to want queer people to know they're not alone in feeling these things. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil might be offensive. It might make me uncomfortable, but sometimes it's good to feel discomfort. Horror is at its best when it's forcing readers to confront something that makes them uneasy. Avoiding this unease can ultimately leave you isolated, which is why I am not at all regretful that I read this book. It helps that the prose is stunning.
It still warrants criticism. All good books do. A generous interpretation of the book is that it's about Schwab's own slow process of overcoming internalized queerphobia. A less generous interpretation is that it's reinforcing harmful homophobic stereotypes, blaming victims for abuse in order to make an overblown point about the cycles of violence, and failing to actually engage meaningfully with the historical time periods during which the story is set. Either way, it's fair to have concerns about the types of queer stories that are more likely to get published and platformed. Schwab is a popular author. There's a good chance that this story gets into the hands of a lot more people than other sapphic vampire books.
I'm still glad this book exists. I'm glad it's going to reach mainstream audiences. No queer author should be forced to avoid dark and messy topics about which straight people have been permitted to write for centuries. I'm not interested in perpetuating this double standard.
What I am interested in is getting a wider range of sapphic vampire stories to reach mainstream audiences. I want more sapphic vampire villains. I want more sapphic vampire heroes. I want everything in between. For this reason, I am here to say that if you like modern gothic horror fantasy novels with complex and questionably moral lesbian vampires as the protagonist, then I recommend The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. It deserves more attention. It's also just tighter and better, in my opinion, than Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. V.E. Schwab has incredible command over the English language, but the prose can start to feel a bit overwrought in a book that has over five hundred pages of pure vibes with little direction. The plot is bloated, and the ending is anticlimactic and constructed very thoughtlessly.
In the future, I hope Schwab continues to write about lesbian and queer villains. I also hope Sabine, Lottie, and Alice (as well as Carmilla, I suppose) aren't the only lesbian vampires that mainstream audiences know anything about.
(For those of you who've read Schwab's other work, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is definitely most similar to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It's basically the same exact book, but gayer and less focused on the philosophical questions that Addie's curse raised about art, memory, and identity.)