Chapter summaries Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil V. E. Schwab

Chapter 36 Summary & Analysis: The Shadow of Hunger

Spoiler Warning: This page discusses the full events of Chapter 36. Proceed only if you have read through this chapter.

Summary

Alice rides the T back to campus in the early afternoon, the train rattling through the dark tunnel. She braces herself against the memory of the man she attacked and tries to focus on Lottie—or Charlotte—the stranger she must find in a city of half a million. She knows almost nothing about her except that she isn’t human. As the train stops, she searches each new face for fragments of Lottie, finding only ordinary heartbeats. The hunger she thought she had sated returns, quieter but present, an insistent whisper. When a woman and child sit nearby, the hunger sharpens; Alice flees the train one stop early and forces herself through the sunlight, feeling drained and sick, until she reaches her dorm. Inside, her suitemates are gathered in grief. They tell her a student, Colin, was found dead in the Yard. Alice realizes Colin was the boy who walked her home the night before, the “nice” one Rachel was interested in. She swallows the secret that she killed him, feigns ignorance, and retreats to her dark room to sleep.

Key Events

  • Alice takes the T back to campus, nervously replaying her encounter with the suited man and the impossibility of finding Lottie.
  • She traces the branching “if” paths that led her to that fatal party, spiraling into thoughts of chance and fate.
  • The hunger resurfaces, low but dangerous, and intensifies when a mother and child board the train, forcing Alice to exit at Central Square and walk the last blocks in punishing sunlight.
  • Upon reaching her suite, Alice finds Lizbeth, Jana, and Rachel mourning a student found dead in the Yard.
  • She learns the victim is Colin, the very boy who had helped her home and whom she attacked; Rachel had romantic feelings for him.
  • Alice hides her guilt with a lie about a migraine, retreats to her room, and collapses into bed.

Character Development

  • Alice confronts the lingering, unquenchable nature of her new hunger, which continues to claw at her even after feeding. She feels the full psychological weight of her transformation: she is both predator and fugitive, unable to confess even when face to face with the grief she caused. Her concern over whether she can still blush shows her anxiety about losing human tells. The chapter underscores her isolation as she listens to her suitemates talk about Colin without being able to reveal the truth.
  • The suitemates (Lizbeth, Jana, Rachel) operate entirely in the world of normal human tragedy. Rachel’s grief over Colin highlights the human cost Alice now carries, while Lizbeth’s casual speculation about an overdose demonstrates how easily death among students is explained away without supernatural suspicion.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

  • Hunger as an Echo: The hunger is redefined—not just a violent shout but a persistent whisper, a well that can be temporarily emptied but never truly filled. It now exists on a spectrum, quiet but always ready to flare.
  • Odds and Fragments: Alice obsessively reconstructs the million-to-one path that brought her to Lottie and to death, turning every “if” into a meditation on chance. On the train, she sees pieces of Lottie in strangers but never the whole, mirroring her shattered sense of identity.
  • Heartbeats as a Soundscape: The train fills with heartbeats described as overlapping drums, a sensory reminder of Alice’s predatory nature and the raw life she now perceives outside herself.
  • Sunlight as Affliction: The sun is a hammer, the skull a sheet of glass; the physical torment of daylight reinforces her vampiric condition and forces her to seek darkness like a wounded animal.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter deepens the horror of Alice’s transformation by showing that the hunger is not a problem that can be solved by a single kill. It will haunt her constantly, making public spaces like the train into ethical minefields. The discovery of Colin’s body brings the previous night’s death into the social sphere, raising the stakes: Alice is now not just a killer in secret but someone who must navigate a community directly impacted by her actions. It also advances the mystery of Lottie’s identity, as Alice realizes she has almost no tools to find her, making the future quest feel daunting.

Study Questions and Answers

  1. How does Alice’s experience on the T illustrate the nature of her hunger after her first kill? The hunger appears as a pale shadow, a low nagging, rather than the overwhelming need she felt before. Yet it sharpens instantly in the presence of the woman and child, proving it can spike unpredictably. This shows that feeding only temporarily diminishes the craving; it never fully vanishes, making Alice perpetually vulnerable.

  2. What is the significance of Alice’s internal “if, if, if” spiral while riding the train? The spiral represents her struggle to reconcile chance, choice, and fate. By retracing every branching decision that led her to the party where she met Lottie, she searches for a logic that might explain her monstrous transformation. It also reinforces the theme of impossible odds, mirroring the futility of finding Lottie with a Post-it Note and a blurry photo.

  3. Why does Alice’s reaction to the news of Colin’s death underscore her isolation? She must physically stop herself from confessing a truth that would seem absurd to her friends. Her internal narrative reveals she feels she “did Rachel a favor,” yet she cannot speak the words. The scene highlights how her double life forces her to lie about migraines, hide behind sunglasses, and retreat into darkness, even around the people she lives with.

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