Keeping readers invested across 500 pages and 500 years in V.E. Schwab's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

This post discusses the entire plot of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, including the ending.

The length and breadth of V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil are two of the novel’s defining features; Schwab takes us on a journey of nearly five hundred years, over the course of more than five hundred pages. As soon as we understand that the novel includes immortal characters who can have many different stories over the course of centuries, we understand the need for the sweeping chronology. The main thread of the narrative follows one character, known first as María and then as Sabine, from 1521 to 2019. How does Schwab keep readers invested and oriented across these hundreds of years and pages?

In this examination of the structure of the whole novel, we’ll see that she uses worldbuilding to rebuild the stakes her immortal characters would seem to erase, character arcs to carry her theme, and chronology and narration to keep us oriented. Her vast five-hundred-year canvas also gives her the space to show that immortality, and the powers it conveys, is fundamentally at odds with humanity. To be human is to die; to love is to accept the eventuality of loss.

The figure above shows the whole novel at a glance. Each tick is a chapter: its vertical position marks the year, its length matches its page count, and its color tells us whose point of view we’re in. Two of the colors belong to a single character—we meet her as María in 1521 and she becomes Sabine, a change we’ll return to.

Read left to right, the figure shows how Schwab uses different POV characters to carry readers over five centuries. María’s chapters, in the bottom corner, advance in years—we looked closely at them in my post on the opening. As Sabine, the name she takes after transitioning to a vampire, she leaps forward by decades and then centuries, covering three hundred years by the novel’s midpoint; my scene study examined the summary techniques that make those leaps possible. At the midpoint, Sabine’s lover Charlotte takes over the narration, carrying us through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and across the ocean to Boston. And running along the top of the figure the whole time is Alice, a Scottish eighteen-year-old just starting at Harvard in 2019, the novel’s present. Her chapters advance not in years but in hours. In those first hours we see her meet Charlotte, now going by Lottie—a meeting that eventually brings all three characters together at the pointed end of the wedge in 2019.

While Schwab uses the word “vampire” only four times in the whole novel, she nevertheless draws on established vampire tropes, though she tweaks many of them. Amusingly, Alice keeps a running tally, declaring “Alice: 1, common lore: 0” when sunlight doesn’t kill her. One problem with writing about immortal characters is that we immediately lose the highest stakes of all: life and death. When you reduce the stakes, you also reduce the tension. Schwab plays with that tension by including each character’s death date on the pages that mark the POV shifts. María’s says 1532. Alice’s, somewhat shockingly, says 2019—the year we first meet her. But the shock wears off once we realize that this is a transition date, not a death date. So how then does Schwab reestablish the stakes?

First, she qualifies the vampires’ immortality. In chapter sixteen, we see María turn Sabine to a pile of ash by drinking away all of her blood immediately after she has been turned into a vampire herself. Not long after, María, who has adopted Sabine’s name, trips and falls onto a wooden stake during a blood-drunk bacchanal with two other vampires she has befriended, Hector and Renata. Her friends, shaken at her near miss, explain to María that a stake through her heart will kill her. To underscore the point, Hector pulls a heart from one of their recent victims and dumps it on her lap, warning her that the worst fate for a vampire is to be burned to death because “the heart burns last.”

Schwab also shows Sabine learning another high-stakes rule: Promises among their kind are binding. Sabine learns this only after Renata has extracted a promise never to leave them, and she finds she physically can’t. Sabine is yoked to the pair as Hector becomes increasingly reckless, and she escapes her bond only after the pair are burned alive—a fate she narrowly avoids.

Schwab uses this promise mechanism one more time in the novel, and this second use increases the tension via dramatic irony. Readers, who now know what binding promises cost, watch in horror as Charlotte makes one. We’re in 1879 at this point, well past the midpoint of the novel, and we are in Charlotte’s POV. We’ve learned from preceding chapters that Sabine discovered Charlotte at a society ball in Regency London and slowly seduced her with the aim of making her a long-term romantic companion.

By 1879 they have been together for fifty years. Sensing changes in herself, Sabine extracts a promise from Charlotte to never harm her. Readers can yell “Charlotte, no!” at the page all we like, but the character cannot hear us and blithely makes the promise. Six decades pass before Charlotte discovers what she’s done. She comes home one night to discover blood everywhere—on the doorknob, the stairs, the walls, and all over Sabine, whose eyes are black, “the pupils wide.” Charlotte describes her as “a languid monster in her lover’s flesh.” When Sabine finally sleeps, Charlotte tries to stab her and finds that she can’t. She can only flee.

Sabine’s slow journey from naïve vampire to bloodthirsty monster points to Schwab’s final worldbuilding tool. Matteo, a fellow vampire Sabine meets in seventeenth-century Venice, explains that though they are immortal, they are still aging—it just occurs invisibly and inside them:

The lesson is explained once more, later in the novel, to Charlotte by Jack, who helps her get away from Sabine: “‘Live long enough, and things begin to rot.’ He draws a hand from his pocket, taps a fingertip against his chest. ‘Compassion, affection, humility, care.’ One strike with every word. ‘They drop away like petals, till all that’s left is stem and thorn. Hunger, and the urge to hunt.’” Jack goes on to tell her that the man who turned him into a vampire made Jack promise to kill him “when he ceased to be himself. . . . I would have to measure, have to weigh, have to decide how much a person—my person—can lose before they are lost.”

Via worldbuilding mechanisms, Schwab enriches and deepens the stakes of her story and connects them to her themes. Life and death are still high stakes, but they stand alongside ethics and power. The question for vampires isn’t so much whether they are still alive—they both are and they aren’t—but whether they are still human, with human-centered values: “compassion, affection, humility, care,” to use Jack’s list.

If the premise of your story weakens the default stakes—through immortality, time loops, a predictable ending—rebuild them through the rules of your world. If life and death aren’t the ultimate stakes, teach readers what are the ultimate stakes via worldbuilding.

Now, the exciting part: Let’s see how Schwab uses character arcs to link all of these components together—chronology, worldbuilding stakes, and theme—to generate power for her novel. She starts planting the theme in the opening chapters by taking us to the opposite ends of her chronology via the characters of María and Alice.

At first glimpse, all we can see are the differences between them. María, trapped in a deeply patriarchal society, has no route out of her small town except via marriage. As we saw in my post on the opening, she meets a widow who seems to have a mysterious power and is able to travel independently—but to be a widow, one first must be a wife. When María selects and attracts a viscount as a husband, she believes she has “won” the game she had no choice but to play. Alice, on the other hand, seems to have an easier path in 2019. She doesn’t need to wed a viscount to escape her small Scottish town; she just needs to get good grades, then get on a plane and take her place in the freshman class at Harvard. Patriarchy is dead, right?

But María soon discovers the strictures of patriarchy aren’t so easily manipulated and she chafes under the power of not just her husband but also his family. And Alice is at sea in her new world, unable to shake the grief that haunts her even as she manages to go to a party, meet a girl, kiss her, and bring her back to her dorm room. Vampirism seems to unlock this stalemate for both characters, moving them farther along their arcs.

Both immediately use their new powers to strike blows against patriarchy. María returns to her husband’s estate, kills the entire family, and sets fire to the house. Alice is assaulted by a male classmate who was ostensibly helping her back to her dorm; when she kills him and drinks his blood, she learns what she’s become. When she next needs to feed, she selects a businessman who is only too ready to prey on the seemingly vulnerable young woman in front of him. Five hundred years apart, these two characters have followed the same path, striking deadly (and satisfying) blows against patriarchal power.

But that very satisfaction is a clever trap Schwab plants for readers to walk into. She’s been hinting at the differences between these two characters all along. When María’s mother tries to school her about patriarchy, warning her that men like the viscount “take what they want,” María thinks silently, “So do I.” The shocking moment when María kills Sabine, the very person who gave her the power to escape patriarchy, illustrates that impulse.

Similarly, María/Sabine has no interest in looking backward, no interest in grief, while Alice is steeped in grief she can’t shake. Sabine watches Matteo’s intense grief after the death of his long-term partner—Alessandro, who steadfastly refused the offer of immortality—and does not understand it. She sees only that his absence “will follow Matteo wherever he goes, from now until the end, like a shadow, a ghost. And Sabine has no desire to be haunted.” Alice, on the other hand, keeps looking backward, both to the night of her own transformation and, increasingly, back to her sister Catty, who we begin to suspect is also dead, though we don’t know how or why until late in the novel.

Striking a blow against patriarchy, it turns out, is the easy part—both characters do it repeatedly within pages of gaining their power. The harder test is the one Schwab built into her world’s stakes: whether a character holding that power can keep her “compassion, affection, humility, care.” That’s the test she goes on to apply to Sabine, Charlotte, and Alice via their character arcs.

Sabine’s shift from protagonist to antagonist, from hero to villain, is encoded in her character arc. We cheer for her when she slaughters her husband and burns his estate, and we even root for her to escape her promise to Renata. But near the end of her POV section, we see that she is incapable of learning the lessons Matteo is trying to teach her. When she says goodbye to Matteo, who has decided to sail to America, she feels lighter and wonders if it is the beginning of the rot he spoke of. However, not one for introspection, she pushes the thought away.

At the midpoint of the novel, the POV shifts from Sabine to Charlotte, and here is where we begin to see Sabine become the patriarchal abuser, the person Charlotte now has to escape. Sabine is lonely; she wants love but without the ever-present possibility of loss and grief. As noted above, she doesn’t give Charlotte the same choice Matteo gave Alessandro—a romantic relationship without vampirism. The choice she presents to Charlotte is starker, an all-or-nothing choice: romance, freedom, and immortality or remaining trapped in the narrow confines of early nineteenth-century England.

Similarly, rather than using the binding promise as a safeguard against her own eroding humanity, Sabine turns it into a shield: She makes Charlotte, the one person best placed to judge that erosion, promise never to harm her.

When Charlotte flees Sabine, she seeks out Jack and Antonia, the only other vampires she’s ever met. Sabine, in a typical abuser move, has kept Charlotte isolated from others of their kind. As he takes Charlotte to the train station, Jack tells her the story about his former partner, William, whom he was forced to kill when his humanity was dwindling. Charlotte briefly wonders how she will tell when that internal rot is beginning inside herself, but like Sabine, she pushes the question away, more excited about the new story she is beginning, one that she gets to write herself.

By this point we can see that Schwab has set up two moral tests for her characters. Do they give their lovers a choice about whether to become immortal? And do they use promises to protect themselves or others? Matteo and William pass. Sabine fails both. These tests let Schwab deepen her argument about patriarchy: It is less about gender than about power. These theme statements aren’t just draped over the plot, they are deeply embedded in it through the character arcs.

One lesson of the book, I think, and one reason for the vast chronological sweep, is that we are not as far removed from absolute patriarchal power as we might wish. Schwab shows this in Alice’s encounters in 2019 with men who would simply take what they want from her: the classmate who assaults her, the construction workers who whistle at her, the businessman who thinks she is something to be used for his pleasure. The fact that Alice can—and twice does—kill these figures isn’t nothing, but it’s also not enough. The impulses of patriarchal power infect Sabine and, by the end of the novel, we wonder if her infection has passed to Charlotte. Does Charlotte still have “compassion, affection, humility, care”? Has she already moved from hero to villain?

To answer those questions, let’s turn our attention to Schwab’s narrative choices. I’ve already noted the midpoint shift, when Charlotte’s POV takes over from Sabine’s POV. This POV shift helps sustain our interest, but it also helps readers clearly see the way Sabine shifts from protagonist to antagonist.

But before that POV handover, we get three important chapters from Alice’s POV. She’s wandering Boston at night, trying to track down Charlotte (whom she knows as Lottie) or at least others like herself. She learns the hard way about the power of grave dirt and almost dies in a church graveyard before finding the will to live and the strength to fight free. Eventually she follows a series of clues to find Ezra, the proprietor of a coffee shop where blood is on the secret menu, and Ezra takes her to Lottie, who tells Alice that Sabine is responsible for turning her, that it’s not Lottie’s fault.

When we turn the page, we are then in Charlotte’s POV, back in 1827. We see Sabine slowly seduce her, gain her trust, give her the choice to turn, and we watch Charlotte accept—we even root for her to accept, for what better choice does she have? And then in Charlotte’s first days as a vampire, we also see the early hints of what Sabine is becoming in her rough lessons and impatience with Charlotte’s scruples.

But at this point, we get a POV change as Alice interrupts: “‘Just stop.’ Alice’s voice is a knife, slicing through the hotel room.” Alice is angry, and she isn’t prepared to let Lottie off the hook:

As readers, we’ve been allied with Charlotte through her POV chapters. Alice’s interruption breaks the spell and reminds us of what else we’ve learned about vampires dying from the inside out. Where is Charlotte-Lottie on that path? When Lottie insists to Alice that “to understand what happened to you . . . you need to know what happened to me first,” we move back to Charlotte’s POV. But this time, as Charlotte resumes her story and charts Sabine’s further descent into inhumanity, we are aware of Alice as a critical listener.

The technique Schwab is using here is a narrative frame: having one POV character tell an embedded story that another POV character is listening to. I’ll discuss this technique at more length in my posts on What We Can Know and The Favorites. In this case, Alice’s skepticism increases the tension in a scene focused on backstory events. When she interrupts again, after Charlotte flees Sabine, we can see she hasn’t been swayed; her anger is still burning hot: “You want me to feel sorry for you? Because you had a toxic ex?”

Those questions echo over Charlotte’s final POV chapters, which track Charlotte through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from Rome to New York, across the United States then back to Boston. Charlotte has a series of relationships, but Sabine eventually arrives to violently end each one. Even as patriarchy has (seemingly) loosened its grip far enough that Charlotte can have an open relationship with another woman, Sabine’s power (an echo or embodiment of that same patriarchal impulse) ensures that she can’t. Charlotte, now Lottie, restricts herself to one-night stands.

In terms of personality, Sabine is established as “cunning and selfish” (in her own words) while Charlotte is established as sensitive and bookish. Yet when we flip back to Alice’s point of view for the final chapters of the novel, we realize that Lottie has perhaps made the same journey as Sabine, though in a more subtle way. If we reread Alice’s very first POV section, we realize with a shock how similar the 2019 Boston campus party is to the 1827 London ball—and that this time Lottie was playing the role of Sabine. Even when Alice recovers a hazy memory establishing that it was indeed Sabine and not Lottie who turned her into a vampire, we are forced to recognize that Charlotte has been selfish at best and monstrously narcissistic at worst. Over hundreds of pages and years, Schwab has guided us through this journey of recognition, preparing us to be both shocked and satisfied by the final plot moves, when Alice kills not just Sabine but Lottie too.

Before closing, I want to draw attention to one more narrative technique, which is Schwab’s use of flashbacks in Alice’s POV chapters. These are full flashbacks—written in present tense and formally marked in the text with an extra level of indentation—rather than memories that are subtly woven into the narrative. This choice means that readers are fully immersed in the flashbacks; we are with the nine-year-old Alice who is bewildered by her sister Catty’s anger as completely as we are with the eighteen-year-old Alice who is trying to fit in to her new surroundings at Harvard.

Schwab delivers a new chunk of flashback in each one of Alice’s POV parts, moving us steadily forward in time, focusing on the years when Alice is nine to fourteen. The girls grieve their mother, who died when Alice was five and Catty was eight, in different ways. Her mother is only a hazy memory for Alice, who more easily accepts, even welcomes, her father’s new wife, while Catty refuses to do so and keeps the entire family on edge with her anger and volatility.

Schwab keeps us in suspense about what exactly happened to Catty until just before the final showdown between Alice and Sabine. Standing in the shower, waiting for her opportunity to kill the woman who ended her life, Alice flashes back to herself at fourteen, getting the phone call telling her that Catty stepped in front of a car and died. Alice’s unresolved grief and anger—that her sister wanted so many stories for her life and barely got one—contribute to her victory over Sabine. And by withholding the details of Catty’s story until this point in the narrative, Schwab gets to provide one resolution for the reader while stoking the tension and suspense over the outcome of the struggle between Alice and Sabine.

These flashbacks are also where Schwab returns to her themes of power and humanity. Grief, in this novel, is the balancing counterpoint of love. True love requires accepting a loss of power, accepting that a love cannot be immortal but must one day end. At only eighteen, Alice has already learned a lesson that Sabine refused, and she turns that lesson into a weapon. If you look again at the chronology figure above, you can see how that wide angle of the opening, the gap of half a millennium, gradually sharpens to a point at the end as all of the stories we’ve seen—Sabine’s, Charlotte’s, and Catty’s—are absorbed in Alice’s story.

The final short chapter is bittersweet. As Alice walks through nighttime Boston, first talking to her father on the phone and then alone with her thoughts, we see her feel both frightened and free. Unlike Catty, she gets to have more than one story. And yet as the final words of the story linger—“the sound of her steps beats like a drum inside her chest, reminding her she is alive. Alive. Alive. And she is hungry”—we wonder if Alice’s arc must inevitably be the same as Sabine’s or Lottie’s. Can we hope that her grief for Catty will inoculate her against the poison of power that Sabine and then Charlotte carried into their own stories?

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