Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: Hunger, History, and the Shape of Female Power

This is a novel that uses fantasy to perform cultural archaeology. Beneath the blood and the gothic imagery, it is excavating the long, uncomfortable history of what happens when women are denied agency—and how power mutates when survival becomes the primary objective.

Between the Covers with Danielle | Literary Reviews | Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

While it moves across centuries and adopts the vocabulary of horror, the book is not interested in spectacle. It is interested in structure: the systems that confine women, the strategies they develop to endure those systems, and the moral compromises that endurance can demand. Immortality is not presented as a fantasy escape, but as a prolonged experiment in what happens when constraint is replaced by unchecked power.

What emerges is a story less about monsters than about inheritance—of violence, of silence, of desire, and of control.

Hunger as Condition, Not Appetite

From its opening movements, the novel establishes hunger as a state of being rather than a physical need. Hunger exists before transformation and persists long after it. It is the hunger to escape prescribed roles, to live outside surveillance, to want without apology.

What’s striking is that this hunger is not framed as moral failing. It is framed as rational response. In every historical setting the novel inhabits, female desire is restricted, regulated, or punished. Hunger becomes inevitable when options are systematically removed.

This reframing is crucial. The novel is not asking whether hunger is dangerous. It is asking what happens when hunger is ignored long enough to radicalise.

Immortality as Ethical Erosion

Rather than romanticising eternal life, the novel treats immortality as an ethical stress test. Over time, emotions dull—not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. Guilt becomes unsustainable when it has no endpoint. Empathy weakens when it interferes with survival.

The most unsettling insight here is not that humanity erodes, but that its erosion feels functional. Loss becomes efficiency. Detachment becomes relief. Immortality does not amplify goodness or evil; it strips away friction.

By removing consequence, the novel exposes how quickly power detaches from responsibility.

Victoria Elizabeth Schwab - Author

Love, Consent, and Asymmetry

One of the book’s most incisive contributions is its interrogation of consent—not as a single moment, but as a condition shaped by imbalance. Relationships are rarely equal here, and the narrative is acutely aware of how affection becomes coercive when one party controls safety, survival, or transformation.

Love is never portrayed as inherently redemptive. It can nurture, but it can also justify possession. The novel tracks how intimacy shifts into domination when autonomy is compromised, particularly for those who have learned that attachment is safer than isolation.

What makes this examination so effective is its refusal to simplify. Control is rarely overt. It arrives wrapped in care, framed as protection, reinforced through dependency.

Violence as Inheritance, Not Aberration

The novel consistently resists the idea that violence is exceptional. Instead, it is shown as cumulative and learned. Characters do not become cruel overnight; they adapt to environments that reward dominance and punish vulnerability.

Trauma is not used as absolution, but it is taken seriously as context. The narrative demands that readers hold two truths simultaneously: that suffering shapes behaviour, and that responsibility does not vanish because harm has been endured.

This refusal to grant moral shortcuts gives the book its gravity. There are no clean villains—only people who have learned, over time, which parts of themselves are expendable.

Time, Repetition, and Structural Stagnation

Although the story spans centuries, its most chilling effect is how little truly changes. Language evolves. Laws shift. Aesthetics modernise. But the underlying architecture of power remains intact.

The novel uses time not to show progress, but to expose stagnation. Patterns recur not because characters fail to learn, but because systems are designed to reproduce themselves. Immortality becomes a metaphor for this persistence: what survives when nothing is dismantled.

History, in this context, is not linear. It is recursive.

Rage, Justice, and the Limits of Revenge

Rage is treated with unusual seriousness. It is neither demonised nor glorified. It is recognised as a logical response to violation, erasure, and constraint. But the novel is clear-eyed about its limitations.

Violence may feel clarifying, but it does not restore what was lost. Revenge can end a threat, but it cannot repair identity. The book draws a sharp distinction between justice and relief, suggesting that the latter is often mistaken for the former.

What follows rage, the novel implies, is the harder work: choosing how to live once reaction is no longer enough.

Autonomy Without Consolation

The ending of the novel is deliberately unsatisfying in the conventional sense. There is no redemption arc, no moral cleansing. Survival continues, but without narrative applause.

Autonomy here is stripped of glamour. Freedom is heavy. It removes excuses. It demands self-governance rather than rebellion. The absence of constraint does not guarantee ethical clarity—it only exposes what remains.

This refusal of closure is one of the book’s boldest choices. It leaves the reader not with answers, but with responsibility.

Final Reflections: Why This Story Endures

What ultimately distinguishes this novel is its precision. Every fantastical element is doing conceptual work. Blood, immortality, hunger, and transformation are not metaphors of escape—they are tools of examination.

This is not a story about becoming monstrous.It is a story about how monstrosity is cultivated—and what it costs to resist it once you’ve benefited from its power.

The book lingers because it refuses comfort. It insists that survival is not the same as virtue, that power requires scrutiny, and that desire, when denied long enough, will always find a way to surface—beautiful or brutal.

And it leaves us with a question that feels uncomfortably contemporary:what do we owe the world once we are no longer bound by its rules?

Danielle Robinson | Literature Critic, Writer | BTh, PhB