Certain books are impossible not to admire even as you acknowledge they aren’t entirely your jam. Such is the case with Anne de Marcken’s unusual, poetic short novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (2024), which calmly draws a common genre trope into the literary sphere. Its protagonist is both unnamed and undead: a woman who, shortly after her arm falls off, is colonized by a jabbering crow. In several short, lyrical sections, the thoughtful woman navigates a chaotic zombie apocalypse, grieving for the better days of her past while also struggling to move forward through a disorienting, broken new world.
Written in short, surreal passages, It Last Forever and Then It’s Over feels more like prose poetry than as straight-ahead narrative, less a page-turner than a thoughtful, eloquent series of existential musings. But it masterfully converts a campy horror trope into a relatable metaphor for the formless, multifaceted grief of recent years. Stylistically, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Jenny Offill, whose short, random-seeming vignettes attain a powerful cumulative effect. Like many novels with more literary leanings, it favors imagery, thoughts, and turns of phrase over the cause-and-effect rhythms of conventional genre story-telling, a realm I tend to inhabit more comfortably. But the writing is remarkable, and the core conceit — which one could imagine two Davids, Cronenberg and Lynch, arm-wrestling over (Lynch wins) — is a stroke of thematic genius.
