IT LASTS FOREVER AND THEN IT'S OVER by Anne De Marcken

Following the universal acclaim for Jessica Au’s exquisite Cold Enough For Snow, I imagine the folks responsible for the Novel Prize found themselves in something of a pickle. How do you follow up near perfection? How can any book live in the shadow of the inaugural winner? In short, it can’t. So they awarded the 2023 prize to two books (both, as it happens, novellas): Jonathan Buckley’s Tell and this… a slow boil existential meditation set during the zombie apocalypse. Yep.

When we first meet the undead narrator of Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, she is dealing with a very practical dilemma. Her arm has just fallen off. It’s a wryly humorous introduction to the kind of curveballs that fill this very atypical zombie novel. Turns out life as a reanimated corpse isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Hunger, decay, pesky humans who want you properly dead. Oh, and then there’s the smart-arse crow that lives in her chest.

De Marcken attempts to strike a balance between fun and profundity, plucking at genre tropes and subverting expectations. It has its moments. Alas, it’s no Night of the Living Dead. Or Cold Enough For Snow.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken
Giramaondo/New Directions/Fitzcarraldo, 2024
125 pages