'Interview With a Vampire' Meets 'Bridgerton' in this 2025 Horror Masterpiece

V. E. Schwab’s dark tale is a beautiful spiritual successor to Interview with the Vampire

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. “It turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full,” one vampire explains to her human companion.

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.

Schwab crafts a beautiful world full of horrors

Schwab’s descriptions are always luscious, whether it’s the passionate sex scenes or details of the cities where vampires lurk. A sojourn in Venice with a much older vampire is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking — a tale of how all good things end, and how hard it is to replace what has been lost. But the story is at its most fun when it stops in Regency London, kicking off a plot that’s effectively Bridgerton if Lady Danbury was secretly a vampire. That arc centers on Charlotte, a young woman pushed into a world of balls and suitors she wants nothing to do with, who receives the same poisoned offer of a new life.

While Charlotte and Maria’s chapters can cover decades in just a page, the 21st century story of Alice plays out over just a few very eventful days. A shy college student at Harvard running from family trauma, Alice is hoping to get a fresh start on life. But she gets just the opposite after a one-night stand, when she wakes up a vampire and has to figure out what happened to her, what it means, and who is to blame.

Charlotte, Maria, and Alice are all are lesbians, and while conventions of the times make it especially hard for Maria and Charlotte to fit in, Schwab doesn’t gloss over the problems Alice faces, either. These vampires defy social norms, not just in their sexuality but as women with the power to fight back against the men who view them as prey. The threat of physical and sexual violence is always lurking, and part of the perverse power of vampirism is the opportunity to be the predator, deciding who deserves to die — or at least who will not be missed.

Both Interview with the Vampire and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil are books about the stories people tell. Schwab’s novel might not have the frame of a literal interview, but it’s filled with teary confessions, outright lies, and clever omissions as vampires manipulate each other and try to live with themselves. They also repeatedly change their stories, seizing agency over their lives rather than remaining supporting characters in someone else’s tale. The meta framing is a beautiful way for Schwab to play with the long tradition of vampire literature. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is part of a long legacy, but Schwab breathes fresh life into the genre to craft a story fans will want to sink their teeth into.