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

The length and breadth of VE 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 500 years, over the course of more than 500 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? How does she control the scope and pacing of the story? Let’s take a close look at the structure to see how she does it, and how she uses chronology to underscore the themes of the novel.

The first three chapters of the novel take us to either end of the chronological span. After the opening chapters in María’s point of view in sixteenth-century Spain, we jump to a trio of chapters set in Boston in 2019. At first glimpse, all we can see are the differences in the situations of our two POV characters.

María, trapped in a deeply patriarchal society, has no route out of her small town except via marriage. In the first chapter, 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. (See my analysis of the opening chapter here.) María knows the rules of patriarchy: “She is many things—stubborn, cunning, selfish—but she has never been a fool. She knows that she was born into this body. She knows it comes with certain rules. The question has never been whether she would wed, but whom.” When she selects and attracts a viscount, 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? A few weeks into the semester, Alice is unsure of herself, a little bit at sea in this new world, not ready to roll her eyes at the suite-mate who says she sounds like Outlander or tell the girl who “tried to bond with her… over the most fuckable guys on their floor” that she’s gay. But she knows that it’s time to seize the life she wants and, unlike María, there are fewer rules for her to contend with. At a college party, she takes refuge in the bathroom, but vows she is going to be “Not Old Alice, but New. New Alice, who leans in instead of out.” And that’s what she seems to do—she leaves the bathroom, meets a girl, and then is dancing with her, kissing her, running through a storm with her, bringing her back to her dorm room.

Both characters at this juncture seem to have gotten what they wanted—but, of course, if that were true then the story would be over almost as soon as it’s begun. So Schwab, like any good novelist, begins to introduce complications. For María, it is the recognition that patriarchy is not a game she can win—the best she can do is thwart it, by taking measures to prevent pregnancy. For Alice, it is the recognition that the ghosts that haunt “Old Alice”—the mother who died when she was five and the grief-stricken older sister, Catty, who is never far from her thoughts but never present either—have a tight grip on her.

By this point, eleven chapters and eighty pages into the book, Schwab is also teaching us how her novel works. We know that Alice’s chapters advance in hours while María’s chapters advance in years, established through time stamps at the POV changes. And there is something else marking the POV changes: an illustrated page with the name of the character and, in parentheses, the date of their death. María’s says 1532, and by chapter 10 we’ve reached 1529. Alice’s page, somewhat shockingly, lists 2019, the year we first meet her, as her death date. What’s going on here? If we’ve read the back cover copy, we may have gleaned some clues: The novel is “about immortality” and features three young women who “grow teeth.” This is enough for us to understand that life and death in this novel do not follow the familiar rules, and we must wait to discover what rules they do follow. In the short-term (and by page 80 we are still only fifteen percent of the way through the novel), this adds to the suspense as we wait to see if immortality + teeth = vampires, as we think it does.

And that’s precisely what Schwab delivers in the next two parts. When we return to María’s POV in chapter 12, we’re in 1532, the year of her death¹. She meets the mysterious widow from chapter 1, an apothecary named Sabine, who gives her a tonic that prevents pregnancy, teaches her to read, and finally, offers her a way to escape her marriage—and, perhaps, patriarchy—altogether. What happens next is the thing that we expect: Sabine biting Maria with her permission and turning her into a vampire. Then Schwab gives us something we don’t expect. Sabine invites María to bite her in turn and María drinks her blood for so long that Sabine crumbles into ash. After this shocking moment of violence against the woman we expected to become her lover, María embarks on a more expected campaign of violence, returning to her husband’s estate, killing the entire family, and setting fire to the house.

Alice’s transformation is quieter but still violent: When she is assaulted by a male classmate who she thought was helping her back to her dorm, she kills him—but disassociates from the act, coming back to consciousness only when she is in a shower, watching blood swirl down the drain. Five hundred years apart, these two characters have followed the same path, striking deadly (and satisfying) blows against patriarchal power.

But here their paths diverge. Alice continues along her slow path, advancing only hours at a time while María leaps forward by years. Both characters must understand how to live in this new form, what the rules are. María adapts easily, looking forward, not back, taking Sabine’s name as ruthlessly as she took her life. But María was offered a choice and said yes to her new condition. Alice did not and that fact, as well as her own history, keeps her 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.

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 makes a number of smart moves to solve that problem—for example, qualifying the vampires’ immortality. As we saw with Sabine, vampires can still die, though not as easily as humans. But Schwab also uses chronological leaps to keep our interest through the long middle section of the novel. Let’s look now at the chronology as a whole.

The first half of the novel is dominated first by María, then by María-as-Sabine. By the midpoint of the novel, we have covered three centuries, following Sabine around Spain and Italy, before she arrives in 1820s London. At this point a new character, Charlotte, takes over the narration, though Sabine looms large as a character in Charlotte’s story. Charlotte’s POV carries us through the twentieth century and across the ocean to Boston, where she, as Lottie, eventually meets Alice in 2019.

In my scene study for Bury Our Bones, I show how Schwab uses summary as a tool to cover all of this ground efficiently and artfully. Here in this structure study, I want to focus instead on the techniques she uses to keep readers engaged across the vast scope of the novel: world-building, character arcs and themes, and narration.

Let’s start with the world-building. 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. Like Alice, Sabine doesn’t have a guide at first and must learn by trial and error, but after ten years she meets two other vampires, Hector and Renata, and they become a family of sorts.

Hector and Renata teach Sabine to put up mental walls so they can’t read her thoughts, to “always be found ahead of your corpses, and never in their wake,” and the ways in which she can still be killed. What they don’t tell her is that 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, targeting churches, and escapes her bond only after narrowly avoiding their fate, being burned alive.

Schwab uses this promise mechanism one more time in the novel, but the second time she trades surprise for dramatic irony—letting 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 and not just a victim.

By 1879 they have been together for fifty years, and Sabine is slowly turning into the kind of power-mad tyrant she herself once married then slaughtered. Sensing this herself, she 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.

As with the promise, readers know what Charlotte is seeing here because Sabine has been warned about it in her POV section. Sabine spends the end of the seventeenth century in Venice, living in a grand palazzo with a couple named Matteo and Alessandro. Matteo is a vampire and, while he drinks from his lover, Alessandro declines to be turned into a vampire himself. Alessandro, who is an artist, asks Sabine, “Is it life… if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?” And Matteo explains to Sabine that though they are immortal, they are still aging—it just occurs invisibly and inside them:

This is how Sabine shifts from hero to antihero, protagonist to antagonist. We cheer for her when she slaughters her husband and burns his estate, and we even root for her to escape from Hector and Renata. But near the end of her POV section, we see that she is incapable of learning the lesson Matteo is trying to teach her. Inevitably, Alessandro dies and Matteo is bereft. Sabine sees that the absence of Alessandro “will follow Matteo wherever he goes, from now until the end, like a shadow, a ghost. And Sabine has no desire to be haunted.” 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 Matteo spoke of. But, not one for introspection, she pushes the thought away. After another eight decades alone, Sabine begins to feel lonely—and that’s when she meets Charlotte. She does not give Charlotte a choice about whether to be turned and, as we’ve seen, she extracts that promise from Charlotte, to never 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 explains to Charlotte what Matteo had explained to Sabine:

Jack goes on to tell her that the man who made him a vampire, William, made him 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.” Charlotte briefly wonders how she will tell when that internal rot is beginning inside herself, but that question is quickly overshadowed by her sense that she’s about to start a new story, one that she gets to write herself.

Schwab is wrestling with powerful, potent themes here—the value of life, the qualities of humanity, the corrupting influence of power—but these theme statements aren’t just draped over the plot, they are deeply embedded in it through the character arcs. As we watch Sabine evolve, we begin to see her take on the qualities of patriarchal power she raged against herself and then replicate those in her relationship with Charlotte.

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 antihero?

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, as we see more and more frequent signs of Sabine acting like a classic abuser in her relationship with Charlotte.

But before that POV handover, we get three important chapters from Alice’s POV. She’s wandering Boston at night, trying to track down 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 first 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. When Alice 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, adding an extra layer of tension and interest as we hear Charlotte’s story in her own voice but also, if we choose, filter it through Alice’s attention. These final chapters 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 Catty’s anger as fully 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. She 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 is dead, having stepped in front of a car. 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.

If you look again at the figure above representing the chronology of the novel, you can see how that wide angle of the opening, the gap of half a millennia, 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 night-time 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, remind 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 patriarchy that Sabine and then Charlotte carried into their own stories?