In Anne de Marcken’s novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions, 2024), winner of the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the narrator is hungry – because she is a zombie, yes, but also because of everything she’s lost. She tells us, “I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder” (1). But she’s lost much more than that: her name, most of her memories, and, most painfully, her lover, a presumably long-dead woman whom she addresses throughout the novel as “you.”

Our narrator is a resident of a hotel occupied by the undead in a post-apocalyptic version of our world. Though, breaking from typical zombie narratives, we’re not in for a survival thriller or horror story. While our zombie narrator does occasionally consume flesh, she mostly turns inward, trying to make sense of “The madness of hunger or the madness of grief or just plain madness” (56). She moves through the world with a numb longing. “[T]o be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual,” she laments. “The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless” (20).

To make sense of their new existence, some of the undead preach to each other on the nature of their reality. Some of them choose new names for themselves, like Marguerite, or Bob, or Janice 2. Not our narrator. Instead, she stuffs a dead crow in her chest. “I might have described the feeling in my chest as a crow,” she says. “Now the feeling is the thing. A furled, feathered thing rotting into my unrotting flesh” (17). Throughout the novel, she converses with the crow. “Which parts are real?” she asks, questioning her reality, to which the crow only offers perplexing strings of words in return: “Shine. Mud. Slow” (53).

With the crow in tow, the narrator sets off from the hotel in search of a memory she keeps revisiting: lying on the dunes near the ocean with her lover. On her meandering journey to the sea, she loses more of her body. She also encounters increasingly odd and eerie scenarios: a seemingly endless hole in the ground, a grandmother feeding her arm to an undead child, and a circle of headless zombies tied to stakes. All the while, she meditates on memory and time.

Remembering the dunes, she thinks:

“You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.

I was a zombie even then. Ravenous eater of a world that was already the last of its kind” (51).

As the narrator wanders toward the shore, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over takes us through a surreal landscape of grief. At a quick 123 pages, the novel is less concerned with traditional plot or stakes than it is with interiority and feeling. De Marcken’s soft and mournful prose deftly swings between striking images and metaphysical musings. And despite steeping the reader in the narrator’s heartache, the novel isn’t without humor. Some of its scenarios (a community of zombies dressed in baseball uniforms, for one) are so bizarre they border on funny – and isn’t that sometimes how grief can feel, trying to make sense of the senseless, tipping over into the absurd?

Haunting and existential, de Marcken’s debut novel is a fresh take on the undead and a powerful contemplation on how loss transforms and remakes us.