Winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions, 2024) is an exploration of the self-erosive tendencies of grief, in which the psychological effects of an all-consuming loss are literalized into a post-apocalyptic landscape of shattered communities and marauding zombies. It’s also very good.
From the novel’s opening line—“I lost my left arm today”—the narrator not only sets up the greater loss of a dead lover, to whom much of the narration is addressed, but also evokes an image of lightness and strangeness that are borne out in what follows. The narrator, who has forgotten her living name, inhabits a hotel full of zombies in the grip of a religious revival. She is ravenous for living flesh and fascinated by a dead crow, which she takes inside herself for a time, hearing (or imagining) its cryptic utterances.
Despite the back cover’s tasteful elision of the Z-word—an “undead” narrator wanders “the afterlife”; the afterlife in question seeming to be a post-collapse Pacific Northwest—de Marcken’s novel is a credit to that much-maligned subgenre of the zombie novel. While the narrator makes mention of the common social metaphors evoked by the image of the zombie (“Zombies used to be drug addicted, television watchers, video game players”), de Marcken takes it deeper into the personal. The actually-dead, like the narrator’s lover, are truly gone, while her own status as a zombie is thematically linked to this loss. Grief, in this conception, is a kind of living death, warping not only the self but one’s entire world.
Animated by this grief, the narrator leaves the transitory space of the hotel, embarking on a journey toward the sea and the memory of her lost love, and along the way encounters ruined images of her past and a future never meant to be. One of the most affecting sequences comes when she arrives at an empty house, described as belonging to the kind of old lady she will now never be, and takes up residence in the garden. This glimpse of a lost future casts her mind into memory, back to childhood and then to love.
The zombies’ growing religious fervor cuts through the heavier subject matter of personal grief, moving from the humorous to the philosophical, as Mitchem, a zombie who has broken off his penis, now seeks to whip his fellows into a worldview casting zombies as the apotheosis of humanity, annihilators of heaven and hell, and declares that “Hunger freed from satiety is grace.”
Hunger is presented as a reflection of grief, forming the thematic core of the novel. When recalling a miscarriage, the narrator tells another zombie, “I think our hunger is what we have instead of what we’ve lost.” This theme of hollow spaces opening in oneself is returned to throughout the story, beginning with the cavity the narrator makes inside herself to hold the dead crow, and carrying through to her later re-encounter with the religiously awakened zombies, now far from the hotel themselves, and a profound ritual of bodily purging, in which hunger might finally be quieted through a detachment from all she has consumed—including, most significantly, the crow itself.
For all that the zombies may represent a world transformed by loss, they are also literal zombies—a fact brought home early in the novel by the multiple scenes of the otherwise soft-spoken narrator falling on living humans in a sudden blood frenzy, tearing into their flesh and killing and eating them. While this novel is on the quieter end of the zombie spectrum, there are still moments of shocking violence, the most haunting of which comes with the image of a living woman feeding parts of herself to a painfully hungry zombie child, to which the narrator wonders, “What is unbearable is already too much. How can there be more?” The question evokes the title and an eternal pain; while loss is a function of temporality, the figure of the zombie suggests a state of grief without end—and the all-consuming monstrosity of that grief for the individual and those around them.
The narrator herself is eventually captured by the living, decapitated, and crucified in a circular configuration of twelve zombies that, to the narrator, resembles a kind of undead clock, marking the passage of time with their very bodies. While a decapitation might prove the dramatic end of a living narrator, it is only one more loss, one more transformation along the way for an undead one. With both her head and body now separately animated, the narrator’s new capacity to see herself from an exterior perspective proves a powerful literary device, reflective of her own status as an undead observer of both life and death.
The novel is fragmentary in structure, its sparse action interspersed with disjointed ruminations addressed to the narrator’s dead lover. The erosion of memory and the self are accentuated by frequent section breaks, which divide each of the novel’s seven parts into dozens of pieces, sometimes no longer than a sentence or a paragraph. The physical space of the breaks on the page—three blank lines—may be larger than usual or may just seem that way given their frequency, but either way evoke the holes in the narrator’s mind and body, occurring where, in a living mind, connective tissue might once have existed.
At around 29,000 words—a novella by genre awards reckoning—It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is, or can be, a quick read. However, de Marcken’s thoughtful style and the novel’s pulled-apart form demand slower consideration, opening a space for the reader. What reveals itself is not just the deeply wrong world of the zombie apocalypse but, perversely, the deeply right world where human feeling is not relegated to a small corner of existence but where the nature of our bodies and the very landscape itself may be transformed to reflect our pain.
In the novel’s opening pages, the narrator remarks that “When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification.” She dismisses this at the time, but, at the end of her journey, her apocalyptic world is revealed as, if not redemptive, then at least a place where grief cannot be dismissed but must be reckoned with. Viewed through this lens, the novel’s final image, of the narrator pulling herself apart to throw open a space for the memory of love, brings the journey of grief home to a beautiful catharsis and marks It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over as one of the most imaginative novels to grapple with loss in recent years.
