A Review of 'It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over' by Anne de Marcken

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (pub. 2024 by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK) is a slim, sparse book in brilliant Fitzcarraldo blue. To flip through it, you might notice quite a lot of empty space on the pages. Margins, pauses, generous spaces between certain paragraphs… Hey, I’m being charged £12.99 for this!

But don’t worry, reader, we are still getting our money’s worth. The precise minimalism on display here – its unassuming size, a tight yet brilliantly intense story that can be cupped in a palm – is what makes Anne de Marcken’s new novella great.

The book is divided into seven short sections, each introduced with an epigraph. Each section begins on the verso (that is, the left hand page when the book is open), an unusual decision that made me flip back to check I hadn’t missed a page. A sense of something missing, then, is evident from the start. The protagonist is missing something too: ‘I lost my left arm today,’ she begins in the first paragraph. ‘It came off clean at the shoulder.’

I should clarify that the protagonist is a zombie.

Zombies: the familiar flesh-eating undead. A mainstay across tediously drawn-out TV shows, Call of Duty arcade shooter modes, the occasional vaguely fun B-movie flick. The zombies themselves are drooling, groaning, mindless. Not the usual fodder for sensitive, subtle literary novels. Some might think it couldn’t be done. They’d be wrong. 

Zombie-ness in It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is frightening in the expected sense: an insatiable hunger for human flesh. But the narrator’s reflective, melancholy tone and unabashed vulnerability lulls you into almost forgetting her hunger. I would help her, I found myself thinking – surely something could be done for her! But the hunger pulses away regardless. The pinprick flashes of extreme violence become doubly horrifying for both reader and narrator.

This is a book about hunger, but it’s also about grief and loss. The story is addressed to a former lover, who is dead and gone, whereas the undead narrator will continue endlessly in her newfound zombie state. This temporality forms another dimension of the zombie’s existential terror: being undead means an infinite expanse of time, stretching impossibly into the future. No matter what happens to your mind or body along the way, you are still alive. You cannot stop being alive.

The book itself traverses both tiny moments and vast swathes of time. Perhaps this unconventional pacing could be offputting for some, especially when conflicts tend to shuffle off into insignificance. Early on in the novel, when the narrator is living with a community of other zombies in a poignantly liminal hotel, fellow zombie Mitchem seems to be on the verge of leading an uprising. But when the revolution comes to a head, the narrator leaves the hotel and does not return. Yet Mitchem and the others recur, like all things do in the afterlife, washed up in different guise later on in the story. (No, the revolution was not a success.) I didn’t feel cheated by this sense of anticlimax – instead, it feels completely appropriate. Why should de Marcken create a plot with ‘stakes’, in the conventional sense, when the story’s engagement with forever – the vastest timescale imaginable – reduces everything to insignificance? Everything that can be lost is already gone. Everything that remains is recycled.

‘I’m trying to get to the ocean,’ the narrator says. At this point in the story, she has been captured by (human, alive) tormentors. They have suspended her from a tree, in a kind of gruesome crucifixion, where she has remained for many seasons or even years. 

‘What’s at the ocean?’ replies her potential rescuer.

What isn’t at the ocean? That brilliant soup of life contains, or at least represents, everything. If only the narrator can get there.

The narrator’s stoicism in the face of unimaginable crisis is stunning, but she never feels like some sort of unreal saint. She is capable of immense, ordinary gratitude. She enjoys spending a season lying in the mud of a garden, experiencing a kind of sublime depression as she looks up at the stars, but she also appreciates getting up and stretching her legs afterwards. Her body is fragile and prone to falling apart, but she’s grateful for what it can still do. This tactile dimension, while understated, is brilliantly drawn – in essence, what if we applied radical acceptance to body horror scenarios? I found myself tugging against the idea, but couldn’t help succumbing to awe. The knee-jerk ‘Oh my god put my fucking limbs back where they came from!’ becomes ‘What a wonderful opportunity to see my body from a new angle!’

There’s a touching sense of kinship with the natural world, too, arguably helped by a perspective that isn’t so concerned with the arbitrary divisions of human time. Yet this is never a magical, pastoral fairyland. There’s competition, arguments, ordinary cruelty, a zombie wearing a rhinestone Juicy hoodie. At one point, a pair of white horses emerge from thick fog, seeming immensely symbolic, until they begin awkwardly mating. ‘They’re beautiful,’ the narrator says, ‘but they are just horses.’

This book is beautiful, but it’s just life. 

Words by Rowan Morrow, he/him