
V. E. Schwab | The PEN Ten Interview
In her latest novel Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Tor Books, 2025), V. E. Schwab crafts a sapphic vampire tale of hunger, desire, revenge, and immortality. The novel interweaves the lives of three women: In 16th century Spain, Maria longs for freedom from family and a loveless marriage; in 19th century England, Charlotte chafes at the constraints of her upper-class life; and after a one-night stand, modern-day Harvard freshman Alice searches for answers. Spanning centuries and continents, Schwab constructs a dark, propulsive, and gory narrative that you can sink your teeth into.
In this interview with Melissa Joskow, graphic design and communications senior manager, Schwab discusses their writing and research process, the importance of writing complex LGBTQ+ characters, and why vampire and queer narratives go hand-in-hand. (Bookshop) (Barnes & Noble)
You’ve talked in your newsletter and on other platforms about the pressure and fear that you felt, publishing another deeply personal book after the success of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. How did you know that this was the next stand-alone story that you needed to tell?
In the wake of Addie LaRue, I found myself grieving the end of a novel that had taken nearly 10 years to write, and afraid I would never find another character-driven story that consumed me in that way. But I also knew I wasn’t done exploring themes of time and immortality, especially transactional immortality. Addie’s was a deal with the devil, but a vampiric conversion is also about cost, something lost and something gained. Plus, vampires lend themselves perfectly to themes of queerness and bodily autonomy, which I also wanted to explore. Add in a preoccupation with collateral damage, a tale of accountability, love, its decay, and revenge, and that became the fertile earth from which Bury Our Bones began to grow.
The vampire genre and vampire mythology is so vast. What vampire stories did you read to prepare to write Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, and how did you choose which elements of vampire lore to include, reinterpret, or add to your worldbuilding?
There is indeed a long legacy, and while I have always been drawn to classical works like Carmilla and Dracula, the vampires that most appealed to me were Anne Rice’s. Not only her creatures of the night, but their humanity, their emotion, their flare for drama. These weren’t unknowable shadow figures, these were people, steeped in time and place, fickle and arrogant and full of longing, and of course hunger.
When designing my vampires, I wanted to balance the inclusion of foundational rules—need for blood, sensitivity to light, consecrated earth—while designing my own traits, ones that could be used to highlight my characters’ individuality. For instance, my vampires decay morally and emotionally over time, their humanity withering, but the speed of that decay is based on their personal level of attachment. Also, while drinking blood causes all vampires’ hearts to temporarily beat again, what they experience while drinking is deeply personal.
Like Addie LaRue, Bones spans centuries and continents. How did you choose which cities and countries the characters would inhabit? Did you conduct any research to bring those time periods and places to life?
One of my favorite things about writing this kind of fantasy—low, grounded, coexisting with reality—is that it exists in our world, both spatially and temporally, which means getting to not only explore certain places as certain points of history, but asking how an immortal would experience and navigate them. History is so rich, it creates a wonderful tapestry on which to play. When I’m choosing the locations—this novel starts in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and ends in Boston—I look to my characters, and what I want for them. We meet Maria in this town on a pilgrimage path, where she’s constantly being enticed by the broader world and the promise of more. That enticement, and Maria’s hunger, goes hand in hand with her point of origin. I try to balance the desire to show as many places as possible with the desire to create an intimate portrayal.
Also, when it comes to research, I do as much as possible, with the understanding that I’m writing fiction, and reserve the right to allow the occasional minor inaccuracy for the sake of aesthetics and storytelling. For example, there is a scene involving a slaughter during a Catholic Mass, and a vampire savoring the notes of sacramental wine on the blood, and an eagle-eyed copyeditor noted that they wouldn’t have gotten to that part of the service. Which is totally valid!! And I kept it anyway.
I think so many people who don’t by default exist at the center of the story feel this pressure to make themselves small, to take up less space, to settle for crumbs instead of a meal. I wanted to explore what liberation looks like, what happens when you learn to take not only what you need, but what you want.
The book shifts perspectives between three main characters—Maria, Charlotte, and Alice. What was your process for constructing their individual personalities, and how did you manage switching between them while writing? Do you typically flesh out your characters first or the world that you are building?
I often lovingly refer to Bones as three novellas in a trench coat, and while I hope the end result doesn’t feel that way to readers, it reflects how it was written. I’m an extensive planner, especially when working on character-driven novels, which are so tethered to a lifetime—often a long one. I basically plan the entire story, both in narrative order—the order the reader experiences the story—and chronological order—the order the story happens to the characters. Once I have the former, I write the latter, sticking with one character from the moment we enter their perspective until the moment we leave it. This helps me maintain an individual voice, with its linguistic quirks and interior landscape. Essentially, by the time I sit down and write the novel, I know as much as psychically possible about each character, their personality, and their story. Then I write and reassemble the pieces into the final novel order.
A running theme throughout the book is the cost of freedom. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are all born in different time periods, but all three of them feel trapped—by societal expectations, by marriage, by family. Becoming a vampire gives them freedom, but it’s conditional on the pain and death of others, and that pattern starts to replicate in their relationships with each other. What drew you to want to explore these toxic relationships between characters?
I think so many people who don’t by default exist at the center of the story feel this pressure to make themselves small, to take up less space, to settle for crumbs instead of a meal. I wanted to explore what liberation looks like, what happens when you learn to take not only what you need, but what you want. Of course there’s a cost—there’s always a cost—but I’d argue that for all three of these women, the reward outweighs it. The widow enters Maria’s life and offers her an escape. Sabine enters Charlotte’s life and offers her authenticity. And while Alice doesn’t get a choice, the fact is, there’s a violence to moving through this world in certain bodies, and she quickly discovers the freedom of no longer needing to be afraid of men, because for the first time, they should be afraid of her. Is it all messy? Of course. Is it fraught? Absolutely. But so is life. We often don’t control what happens to us, but what we do control what we do with it. How we move forward, how we love, and who and why and how we hurt. It’s about cycles, how we repeat them, and how we break them.
Traditionally in fantasy novels, the main character follows a hero’s journey, developing and growing as a person as they learn to overcome challenges and flaws. Maria’s story takes the opposite route, as she gets progressively more villainous. What do you hope readers will take away from this antihero approach to character development?
It was the propelling force for this book. I’m known for my antagonists, for complex anti-heroes. I wanted to write a queer villain. And for so many years I felt pressured not to do it, lest anyone conflate queerness and villainy. But that’s such a reductive take, because queer characters—and by extension queer people—deserve to be depicted with the same nuance and complexity as their straight counterparts. They deserve to be heroes and villains and everything between. Writing how a person becomes a villain is the most natural thing in the world. Gravity pulls us that way, much more easily than toward selfless heroism. It’s just a matter of finding the personality type that doesn’t resist the pull. The kind of person who wants to fall.
I wanted to write a queer villain. And for so many years I felt pressured not to do it, lest anyone conflate queerness and villainy. But that’s such a reductive take, because queer characters—and by extension queer people—deserve to be depicted with the same nuance and complexity as their straight counterparts. They deserve to be heroes and villains and everything between.
Alice’s storyline flips between two timelines—the present day, where she’s investigating how and why she has become a vampire, and her past, where she relives crucial moments from her relationship with her older sister, Catty, who she looks up to and is also often at odds with. Is there something special about a sibling relationship, rather than a friendship or romantic relationship, that you were interested in exploring through their dynamic?
I’m always hesitant to write romantic dynamics, because I’m very aware that their existence in a book seems to cause readers to mentally downgrade every other kind of relationship, and to be frank, the other kinds often interest me more. Yes, romantic entanglement—along with intimacy, and lust—are rich in creative potential, but so is the dynamic of friends, enemies, families. I always want to give space to those relationships too. And especially for Alice, who is the only one of the three who was already out, I wanted to anchor her struggle for identity in something else. It made sense that she was struggling to find herself, on the cusp of adulthood, after stepping out of Catty’s shadow.
Hunger is another theme that runs through the book. One of the most haunting aspects of vampirism in the world you’ve built is that no matter how much they feed, a vampire’s hunger is never satisfied. Can you share a bit about why you chose to explore this theme of hunger?
Hunger is so thrilling because it takes so many forms. There’s physiological hunger, the need for sustenance, but also the hunger to be loved, to be seen, to take up space in the world. The hunger for attention, for sex, for knowledge, for revenge. Hunger has the potential to be gentle, nourishing, but also violent. Hunger is a universal thing, though it molds itself to individuals in different ways. We rank out hungers differently, based on what we want, what we need, what drives us. For some, hunger is shallow, and for others, they’ll never be full. I’ve always been one of the latter.
The novel plays with a number of genres—queer fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and romance, to name a few. How do genre conventions, and breaking those conventions, help you tell the stories that interest you the most?
We often treat a genre as a set of walls, a room we have to play within, but one of the most exciting things about genres is that they’re not mutually exclusive. The fun is in the folding together, the tangling up, the subversion. And as with all forms of art, understanding the tropes and conventions is what allows you to play with them. I’ll be honest, the concern with where one genre ends and another starts is something I care less about, the more I write. I just want to tell the best story possible. It might drive publishers mad, when I tell them I want to write a story that sprawls across horror, romance, literary, and fantasy. But it delights my creative heart, and thankfully, readers don’t seem to mind the increasing resistance to definition and containment.
Queer characters and their real-life counterparts deserve to take up space, even when the story isn’t about their identity. Queer presence, and queer existence, shouldn’t be radical, but it is.
Three of your books and one essay collection have been banned in school districts in Florida, Iowa, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to PEN America’s 2023-2024 index of school book bans. PEN America has also found that of the 4,218 unique titles banned in the 2023-2024 school year, a quarter (25%) included LGBTQ+ people or characters. You’ve been writing LGBTQ+ characters into your books from the very beginning, and a few years ago you shared your coming out story. In a moment when LGBTQ+ stories are under attack, how do you approach writing LGBTQ+ characters? And what do you feel is the importance of including LGBTQ+ characters in fiction?
I write LGBTQ+ characters exactly as I’d write straight ones, which is to say, with the level of nuance and complexity that they deserve. Often, the queerness of my characters is not relevant to the narrative, the inclusion not predicated on mining their pain or trauma, because queer characters and their real-life counterparts deserve to take up space, even when the story isn’t about their identity. Queer presence, and queer existence, shouldn’t be radical, but it is.
Victoria “V. E.” Schwab is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books. Schwab’s series and standalone titles for readers of all ages have made her a major literary figure, whose notable works include the Villains series, the Shades of Magic universe, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. When not haunting Paris streets or writing in the corner of her favorite coffee shop, she lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.