It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
by Anne de Marcken

Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted October 23, 2024

Buy from Bookshop or Amazon. A purchase through our links may earn us a commission.

The winner of the 2024 Le Guin Prize is a very well written, but puzzling, novella. The only publication date I have found is March of this year, but it also won the Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize two years ago, which is for both published and unpublished work. It may have been revised before publication. Several sites describe it as a novel, but the Le Guin page is correct in identifying it as a novella, approximately 28,000 words. It is written in second-person narrative form, a woman addressing someone who might be her husband, who may or may not already be dead. If he is still alive, she may have left him to avoid hurting him. We never learn her name, she can't remember it herself, but we do know she is undead, and while she is a zombie of sorts, it is different than the typical way the undead have been described.

She starts her story by telling us, "I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder. Janice 2 picked it up and brought it back to the hotel." The narrator is articulate, frequently dropping in literary references, as well as from pop-culture. How she can remember those things but not her name is puzzling, but it appears that is common with the other undead she knows, who have taken on assumed names. They live in an abandoned hotel, but for reasons not explained, she walks away from the hotel in search of something else. We later learn she is heading west, towards the ocean, hoping to find the place she remembers spending time with whom I assume is/was her husband. It is very dream like, in fact I kept thinking it was a detailed transcription of a dream. She walks for days along an empty highway, then takes a familiar exit trying to find an old poplar tree plantation. When she reaches it, several of her undead friends from the hotel have arrived ahead of her. They have all taken on other assumed names, all "Pirate 1" or "2" etc, depending on the number on the baseball uniform they have picked out. She doesn't get a uniform, instead it is plain, white wool pants and shirt.

She had been a vegetarian, but accepted eating meat as a zombie. She can apparently control her appetite, since she mentions only two times when she ate another person, although it may have happened more often. All she wants to do is find that sand dune she remembers from a past vacation. She finally does reach it, or at least a sand dune, but that came after she was abducted by human zombie hunters, then rescued by a woman whose grandson was a zombie. She had also followed the directions given to her by a dead crow. When she reached the beach she saw other crows, but she could not understand what they were saying. Again, dream like, with disjointed conversations that don't make sense (or at least not on the first reading), landscapes that change without warning, with reminiscences of a past life interweaved with the current journey. It is hard to say if the woman's thoughts were meant to have any coherence or orderliness, or if it is just a fever dream. Her thoughts made sense to her, and that continued even after her mind was disconnected from her body. She may still be there, staring across the ocean, sunset after sunset. I will want to re-read this, and I suggest you seek it out too. Maybe you can unravel the puzzle.

 

We would appreciate your support for this site with your purchases from Amazon.com, Bookshop.org, and ReAnimusPress.