I am not especially fond of zombies or especially deep into literary fiction, but I have been really enjoying stories about grief this year—notably “Death Benefits” and The Warm Hands of Ghosts—and so when a book club friend highly recommended Ursula K. Le Guin Prize-winning It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken, it immediately got my attention. 

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is written from the perspective of a sentient zombie with spotty memories of her human life (and how the zombies became sentient or how commonly this occurs is left unexplained—it’s not that type of story), searching for meaning in her undeath and reflecting on the loss of her lover. There’s no real plot to speak of, but it’s a short enough novella to hold the reader’s attention with a series of episodes, without needing an overarching narrative hook. 

Many of the constituent episodes—especially in the early stages of the book—are opaque, but even so, they’re oddly compelling. The dead crow that graces the cover serves as the lead’s constant companion for a good chunk of the story, despite there never being much reason to believe it is at all special in itself, or that its nonsensical outbursts are anything but the lead’s imagination. And yet those segments of the story remain beautifully written, and the fascination with the crow is at least partially explicable in terms of a search for meaning after the lead’s loss of humanity. 

These strange little episodes in the lead’s unlife, along with her earnest reflections on love lost, didn’t quite hit me hard enough to make this a story I couldn’t put down, but at the same time, they very much did make me want to keep reading. And later in the story, there is a secondary character only glimpsed in fits and starts, but whose story is so heartwrenching that I adored every single scene she was in. Keeping with the theme of the novella, it’s not plotty enough for me to want to call it a subplot; rather, it’s a handful of glances into a life that is utterly compelling in spite of its scant page time. And while it’s only a side story in the lead’s journey, it wonderfully reinforces the novella’s major themes of grief and the search for meaning after loss. It’s rare that there’s an image so compelling that I’d recommend a book for that one image alone, but there is absolutely one here. 

Overall, It Last Forever and Then It’s Over isn’t my standard fare and is structurally dissimilar from much of genre fiction. There’s a whole lot of meditation, plus a few striking images and beautiful passages, but there’s quite little in terms of plot or explanation. But it’s short enough to get by without much plot, and it delivers some story segments that are truly some of the best things I’ve read all year. And even the elements that I found more opaque were beautiful and compelling. This is not a story that will stick with me in full, but it was a fascinating read with some individual sections that won’t come unstuck from my head for some time. In short, it’s the sort of book that I liked in the immediate aftermath of reading, but is only going up in my estimation the more I think about it. 

Recommended if you like: weird literary meditation on loss, striking imagery. 

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Character with a Disability (even if you don’t count being a zombie), and it’s also Published in 2024 via an Indie Publisher and Features Dreams.

Overall rating: 18 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.