It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
CO-WINNER OF THE NOVEL PRIZE
WINNER OF THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE
WINNER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD
WINNER OF A PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD
This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.
The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known--where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.
A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader's mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader's imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
the best book about grief I have read yet, I think.
"There are no more three-day-long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon excess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment. But to be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual. The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless."
"There are no more three-day-long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon excess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment. But to be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual. The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless."
What a fun, weird, little ride. Unlike any zombie story I've ever read before, in a good way. It can be difficult to follow at times, and I was left with a lot of unanswered questions, some that I was content to have left unanswered and others that I think would have served the plot (what little there is) better to resolve because they ultimately distract from the themes. It's a quick read, more "vibes" than story as others have said, but the visuals are delightful and grotesque to imagine. I found myself wishing this would be adapted into an animated short film.