V.E. Schwab took the literary world by storm in October 2020 with the pandemic release of her fantasy novel “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.” But the smash-hit bestseller about an immortal woman doomed to be instantly forgotten by everyone she meets was far from her first title.
Now, nearly five years and a few books later, Schwab is debuting her latest novel, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” which is set in the same world as “Addie LaRue,” but written in direct contrast to that book’s themes and in response to its immense success.
“‘Addie LaRue’ is a story about immortality and hope, and this is a story about immortality and hunger,” Schwab told Variety in an interview ahead of “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil” hitting book stores Tuesday. “All immortality deals, whether they’re vampires or deals with the Devil or ghost stories, they’re all transactional, right? You give something up and you gain something in return. And I was really interested in the idea of what hunger is, and hunger as an angry thing, as a rageful thing, as a kind of limitless force, specifically something that women are told not to be. And the kind of hunger that overwhelms you, whether it’s a hunger to be loved or to be seen, to be understood, or simply to take up space in the world, that’s where the commonalities are.”
“Bones” is a century-sweeping novel that follows three women, Alice, Charlotte and Sabine, who each become vampires (though that specific moniker is only used once in the entire book) and deal with the blood-sucking sentence and their resulting desires and passions in very different ways. And though both “Bones” and “Addie” are books with queer love storylines, “Bones” is firmly focused on three queer women who are unapologetically “messy” and “villainous,” per Schwab, each in their own way.
“Addie also wants to take up space in the world, wants to leave a mark, but she’s not hungry in this way,” Schwab said. “She’s happy, she’s joyful, she’s hopeful. And I always joke that, like, hope is great, but so is spite. And I think these are the two things that I hold in my hands: ‘Addie’ is hope, and this is spite. And I also wanted to look at the horror element, and I think there’s an inherent horror to moving through the world in a female form. Every time you step outside, you are inherently in danger. You are told by society and by whole swaths of it that you are prey, that you are not the thing to be feared, you are the thing that fears. And I wanted to write a story in which the greatest form of liberation that a woman experienced was going from being the prey to the predator. It’s definitely a different facet of womanhood than ‘Addie.’”
Read on below for more from Variety‘s conversation with Schwab, including an update on where her book-to-screen adaptations of her novels “Addie LaRue,” the “Vicious” trilogy, the “Darker Shade of Magic” series, and now “Bones.”
“Addie” blew up, it was huge. How did you feel after that, having written plenty of books before that? And how did you decide to write “Bones” as a sapphic love story? While “Addie” had elements of queerness, this is much more explicitly queer.
It’s so interesting to have been a writer for so many years and for how my writing pre-dates my coming out, and then post-dates my coming out. I was queer when I wrote “Addie,” and I’m queer when I wrote “Bury Our Bones,” but one is subtextual, and the other is textual in so many ways. And I think a lot of that is a reckoning for myself and with publishing. I always like to write messy characters. And for many, many years, it felt like I wasn’t. I was discouraged from writing messy queer characters or villainous queer characters, lest it be conflating queerness and villainy. But it’s so reductive, because queer characters, and by extension queer humans, deserve the same degree of nuance and complexity that their straight counterparts do.
And so I think in many ways, this book is a reckoning for me with the ways in which I tried to assimilate into publishing for so many years and make my femininity smaller, make my queerness smaller, do things which I felt would help me appeal to the larger audience. But I feel like in the wake of “Addie LaRue’s” success, if I don’t transmute that success into authenticity, into simply writing the messy women, the messy queer characters, letting them be extraordinarily flawed and human and nuanced, then what’s the point of that success? Success should make you bold, not fearful.
“Bones” was written before this — but right now, vampires are very hot. We’ve got the “Buffy” reboot coming, the “Twilight” animated series, AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire” is very, very popular. It’s a good time to be coming out with a new sexy vampire story. But how your vampires are different? What stereotypes have you embraced, and what are you working against?
I mean, I will die on this hill, but I don’t think there’s a such a thing as straight vampires. There’s young vampires, there’s not straight vampires. No, I mean, I have always been interested in the logic, and it’s similarly with “Addie LaRue,” one of the things I wanted to explore was the fallacy of immortal apathy. I don’t believe in it. I don’t buy an apathetic immortal, because any immortal can find a way to end it. Like Addie, all she has to do is opt out, right? So I’ve always had this trouble with vampires having this deep existential ennui because I’m, like, bitch, walk outside then! You can’t be a suicidal vampire, you’re gonna do it, there’s ways.
And so I wanted to look at like, from a logic question, why are there not many vampires? OK, well, something about them must become self destructive over time. And so I wanted to explore the concept of decay as an internal state, almost like a dementia, almost like an erosion of self, so that over time, your sense of humanity is what dies and what’s left is an animal instinct. And an animal instinct is good, but also it doesn’t keep you safe. It makes you reckless. So I really wanted to explore this humanistic concept of, we all die at different rates, and for some people, their humanity begins to decay almost instantly. And for some, it’s hundreds of years and it just depends on how attached they were to that humanity in the first place.
So obviously sunlight is bad, but they won’t self-immolate. Churches are fine, but consecrated Earth is dangerous to them. I wanted to find danger points really, what it all comes down to is the heart. The heart comes last. The heart stays mortal. The heart is the seat of humanity, but also of weakness. And so I’m my usual self with the psychology and symbolism in everything that I do. But I liked that it created a concept that allowed for individual realization. So for instance, like Alice, Charlotte and Sabine, are all going to decay at completely different rates based on who they are.
So let’s go to our three leading ladies: Charlotte, Sabine and Alice. People are going to have a lot of thoughts on who’s their favorite and and why, and who they don’t like, and why. Can you tease who each of these women are and what you’re trying to say with each of them?
The shorthand that I use is that Alice thinks with her head, Charlotte thinks with her heart, Sabine thinks with her hunger. These are the most codified versions of them. Alice is our modern day protagonist. She is 18. Her entire life is starting. She has a one night stand at a college party, and she wakes up the next morning and she’s dead. So Alice is probably our most relatable. She’s modern, and I wanted to play without that it would feel so weird if she didn’t acknowledge that vampire pop culture was a thing. And so part of her quandary is having to deal with the disconnect between the weird stories that she’s grown up with and the fact that this has actually happened to her. And I tried to make it the most human, what would I do? What would I do? Just as me, if I woke up tomorrow and started becoming a vampire. I’d probably have a massive cognitive dissonance about it. And the word vampire is used one time in the entire book for this reason.
So she’s our modern one, which means she has the most evolved sense of her own queerness and societal placement, but also is the only one whose vampiric origin story post-dates vampire pop culture, because when Sabine becomes a vampire in the 16th century, there is no pop culture, and also there is very little queer lexicon for her. In fact, she doesn’t realize that another life is possible outside of the bounds of her current one, until somebody shows it to her. And that’s another theme, which is the idea of kind of the queer mentor, or the person who comes into almost every young queer person’s life and shows them that there’s a model. And then Charlotte is just all heart, unfortunately. She is empathetic, she is emotional, she wants to be loved, and her desire to be loved is the most dangerous thing about her, because she values feeling loved over anything else. And so I am really curious to see who feels what. I have in my mind a very, very strong opinion about who the most evil of the three of them is.
What new book are you working on right now as you’re promoting this?
I just finished the third and final “Villains” book, “Victorious,” which comes out next year. And I actually am working on the feature film treatment for “Vicious” right now, for the first one. So I’ve been working on that, closing that loop, and I got a couple little secrets coming up, couple secret stories that haven’t been announced yet. And then I’m returning to the “Threads of Power” world to do my next book, and that one I’m really excited by. It has a big plot element that’s like “Count of Monte Cristo,” but in Red London. I get to take one of my favorite stories of all time and make a little nod to it.
I did a list, actually yesterday, of all of my books, and I think it goes up to 2030 right now. Just through when the works sold or on schedule.
Is something tied to “Bones” on that list?
Five years is a long list. And also the thing about these books that I like to think of as the “Garden” now, which starts with “Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” and then “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” is that each and every one of them should also be able to stand alone. So for instance, you don’t need to read “Addie” to get “Bones” or vice versa. Any other installments that I do will be similar in that, they will have a slight aggregate effect to the discerning reader. But I think it’s more just my little literary urban fantasy world, and they’ll all kind of be a part of that atmosphere. So it’s written a specific way. It’s got a lot of heart and soul and dark psychology to it.
“Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” is being adapted into a movie. Would you think “Bones” would be best adapted as a movie or as a TV series?
I would think that “Bones” is better as TV because of the scope. So we’re in the works. It’s early, early, early, early — but it is in the works for television right now, just because I felt pretty strongly about that when it was time to make a decision. “Addie” works as an individual arc. It’s three characters, but it’s truly nucleic, whereas “Bury Our Bones” is so sprawling that I think to do justice to all three women and the supporting cast, which I love, I want it to be a TV show.
When it comes to book to screen adaptations, I know you’ve had lots of projects in the works, one, “First Kill,” has made it to the finish line. So where are you at with each of those right now and how do you feel about the process of adapting at this point?
I’m not at the same level of connectivity on all of my projects, historically, but going forward, I really am. So going forward, I think because my allegiance is to the source material, my goal is always to find the best team for the adaptation, not to say that what makes the best book and what makes the best show and what makes the best movie are the same, but they’re in conversation. So my goal is to be the voice that makes sure that the heart and soul of the characters are there. Plot changes based on medium, that I care a little bit less about, but making sure that the emotional stakes for my characters are there. So I’m pretty deeply involved now, centrally in anything. And maybe that means it takes a little bit longer, but I’d much rather something take 10 years instead of one, and be the right adaptation.
There were a few times in “Addie’s” journey even where I could have seen it going forward and I’m glad that it didn’t. I know readers are frustrated, but it has been worth taking the time to get the right version of the script, to get the right budget, to get the right support, to make sure that it’s the best version that it can be. I am the most impatient person in the world, but I am learning to be more patient on the TV and film side, just because, as a novelist, as a storyteller, I think it will always be worth the time that it takes.
That’s kind of what happened with “Vicious.” “Vicious” was the first project of mine to sell rights. And it was like to Ridley Scott’s company back in 2013 and it has now had so many iterations. But I finally feel like I have the chops and the experience to be able to come back to that project and say, actually, I want to do this, because I have it in my mind, and I have that kind of flexibility where I love taking a thing apart and putting it back together.
Obviously, there are times when I need many more voices in the room. For something like “Bones,” it’ll not be just me, and I wouldn’t want it to be. But for something like “Vicious,” I’m like, let’s just hash this out, let’s find the right team and the right people and do it that way.
One of the reasons that “Vicious” has taken so many turns is there was a version of it, when we were pitching for television originally, where they were, like, “Can you make it more like ‘The Boys’?” And I’m like, no, “Do you want me to take ‘Goodwill Hunting’ with superpowers and make it ‘The Boys’? No!”
Where are you with the “Darker Shade of Magic” adaptation?
You’re not gonna like the answer. When I first started prepping it to sell more than 10 years ago, I wanted it to be for television, and I wrote the pilot, and then it sold for film. And I was like, this is going to be an almost-impossible adapt in a film. And shockingly, it proved an impossible adapt in a film. It went through multiple very talented screenwriters, and they could not crack it. And every single time they tried, it got further and further. And so we are, 10 years in, pivoting it back to television, and I am really glad. I think readers are devastated, or will be devastated, because it’s a step back in the creative timeline. But honestly, I want to do it right. Kell and Lila deserve the space to have their proper adventures. And so I’m really optimistic, because even though we went from being further down the line to back down to now back to the starting blocks, it’s better to do that now than after it’s cast and all of those things. And so it’s unfortunately back to the beginning, but it’s back to the beginning in a way that I think will be really great for the project’s longevity.
Would you say of all the adaptations that the “Addie” film is the furthest along?
“Addie” is definitely the closest. It’s been a really weird journey because when I first sold “Addie LaRue,” I when I sold the film rights, I hadn’t written the book, and then I spent like five years essentially being a living story Bible at the screenwriters’ disposal. And then it went through many, many iterations. And then eOne got acquired by Lionsgate. So now “Addie” is at Lionsgate, and Lionsgate is so invested in making it the best version of itself. And I am really heartened by that, because there is a way to make “Addie” faster, cheaper, put it on streaming and be done. And I just went out and met with Lionsgate in LA, and they’re so aware of what it is and of what they have. It’s one of the reasons they wanted eOne. So they’re very, very intentional about, let’s move slow and measure and make sure that we have the perfect version of this script so that we can do exactly what we want with it. It’s not there yet. I am a deep skeptic of all things Hollywood, but I’m really, really excited by where it’s at and how it’s moving. And I cannot wait to see the next step of it.
Do you have any recommendations for readers, either viewing, listening or more reading, for a “Bones” Summer vibe?
Obviously “Interview with the Vampire,” because it is truly one of the most extraordinary pieces of small-screen cinema. Gorgeous visuals. Then “Killing Eve,” specifically Season 1. Listening, you need like Kiki Rockwell and Florence and the Machine. I think that’s your quartet.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
