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It's a toxic lesbian vampire summer: ‘Bury Our Bones' is V.E. Schwab at her realest
It's a toxic lesbian vampire summer: 'Bury Our Bones' is V.E. Schwab at her realest
V.E. Schwab is hungry.
The bestselling author of 2020 breakout 'The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue' has spent most of her career assimilating, presenting herself as less feminine and less queer. She used a pseudonym for her first name, Victoria, in part as a gender-neutral appeal to fantasy readers, a historically male-dominated genre. She was told to temper her ambition. She was told to want less.
Over a dozen novels later, Schwab says she's done filtering herself. She's starving to be her most creatively uninhibited self and 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil' (out now from Macmillan) is her meal ticket there.
'The thing you realize when you spend so many years just trying to be what everybody else wants and trying not to rock the boat is that you're the only one that drowns,' Schwab tells USA TODAY.
'Bones' lets messy LGBTQ+ villains bite
"Bones," which Schwab calls 'three novellas in a trench coat,' follows three vampires – one in 16th-century Spain, one in London in the 1800s and another in Boston, circa 2019. It's a toxic love triangle, a cautionary tale of vengeful exes and a thrilling, genre-defying ode to queer want. It's her most explicitly queer novel yet.
After she saw how LGBTQ+ characters in spy thriller series 'Killing Eve' and AMC's remake of 'Interview with the Vampire' were embraced, Schwab was inspired to write a story centering messy, queer villains. Historically, LGBTQ+ characters are typically killed off (see the 'bury your gays' phenomenon) or sanitized. But as queer representation increases in media, audiences crave different, more complex stories.
'I just desperately wanted to write messy people, because when we insist that queer characters be perfect citizens, we say that their queer analogs in reality also can't make mistakes,' Schwab says. 'It's so reductive, it doesn't allow for complexity, it doesn't allow for nuance. It doesn't allow us to take up the same amount of space in the world as our straight counterparts.'
Vampires on page and onscreen have long had queer undertones, especially with social outcast, androgyny, seduction and desire not embraced by larger society. Schwab calls 'the turn' from human to vampire the perfect metaphor for queer awakening.
She's not the only one ready for more frank representation. AMC's 2022 remake of 'Interview with the Vampire' focused explicitly on queerness, where the original novel and 1994 movie left it up to fans to decode. 'Bones' takes that a step further by centering on female vampires.
'I felt like (vampire stories) often centered men, or if there were female vampires, they kind of were just objects of sexual desire on the periphery,' Schwab says. 'There is an inherent violence to moving through the world in a feminine body. You invite violence by simply existing, you are marked prey by the world. And I thought about the ultimate liberation of moving from prey to predator.'
Schwab's characters are liberated – after they turn, they can live authentically. They also all deal with their vampirism differently, an apt metaphor for how coming out can affect people differently. All three characters share a common desire for more than their old life could offer.
'When I say that this is a book about hunger, I mean everything – it's the hunger to be loved, it's the hunger to be seen, it's the hunger to be understood, it's the hunger to take up space in the world, it's the hunger to take what you want as well as what you need. And hunger in the wrong hands is violence. Hunger in the right hands is romance,' Schwab says. 'Hunger, to me, is one of the most universal sensations. … it could be a meal or a life.'
New book isn't 'Addie LaRue' – and Schwab is OK with that
Still, the leadup to 'Bones' hasn't always felt so joyous. Every time Schwab teases information about the book, people ask her to write a sequel to 'Addie LaRue' instead. She's seen some readers declare 'Bones' an automatic skip because it has lesbian characters. She isn't letting it deter her.
'If I couldn't translate the success of Addie LaRue into sheer unapologetic storytelling, then it was a disservice to that book,' Schwab says. 'There is an inclination when you have such a large success to conform to it.'
Instead, she says she wrote 'Bones' for her and hopes readers find her where she is. Early rave reviews confirm her hopes. 'Addie LaRue' taught her to abandon perfectionism and instead focus on purpose.
Schwab wants to see both publishing and readers make room for other queer writers, who she says are 'always told to hunger for less or just settle.' In a landscape of exceptionalism where few marginalized writers break through to mainstream success, Schwab's rallying cry is 'more.'
'I'm hungry for stories, I'm hungry for art, I'm hungry for music that makes me want to make (art), I'm hungry for books. I have a voracious appetite for anything artistic,' Schwab says. 'Men are told to hunger, women are told to feed. And I think it's totally OK to hunger.'
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Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
