A zombie with an existential crisis and a twist on the detective story

FICTION
It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over
Anne de Marcken
Giramondo, $29.95

Tell
Jonathan Buckley
Giramondo, $32.95

Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and Jonathan Buckley’s Tell were in 2022 jointly awarded the Novel Prize, the biennial award that honours stylistically innovative literary fiction. It was set up in 2020 as an international collaboration between three independent publishers – Giramondo (Australia), New Directions (US), and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK).

The inaugural winner was Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, a thoughtful book that appeared on numerous shortlists and won the coveted Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, as well as the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s fiction award.

De Marcken’s novella is a zombie story, adapting this overused popular trope and making it anew. It is an accomplished debut novel from the American writer that follows the meditative wanderings of a zombie who can’t remember her name.

We meet this nameless undead the day she loses her left arm. “Mitchem says I’m in denial. That I am depressed because I am indulging in a sense of loss instead of wonder.”

The zombies she lives alongside have chosen new names for themselves, but our narrator does not. Trapped somewhere between the living and the dead, her old life and her new existence, she longs for the woman she loved before and the life she thought they would have together. Through her eyes, we witness the existential crises of a horde of zombies questioning their place in the universe and her own ache for everything she is forgetting.

Facing this unreal reality, she chooses to run. “The world is big and empty, but inside of me is even bigger, even emptier. Hunger makes me vast and bottomless. I run and I run and I run. I eat the road. I devour it.”

It makes for a strange, slow sort of zombie adventure that distils action into sensation without the experience of pain or fear. However, it is, surprisingly, full of tender moments and sustained throughout by a love that persists even in de Marcken’s post-apocalyptic world, where time is endless because, in the case of our narrator, she’s already dead.