shaddie's Book Journey

in zombie theory: a reader, sarah lauro notes that the fear of zombies is truly a “fear that one will, in losing one’s consciousness, become a part of the monstrous horde”. zombies are scary to us because they have shuffled beyond an imitation of life. they represent an overwhelming fear not just of death but what death will do to us. will we forget who we were on earth as the ancient greeks believed? will it make us monstrous and cannibalistic and devoid of humanity? will we shuffle quietly into an afterlife that doesn’t resemble anything we wanted on earth? when our lives are pulled away, what are we left with? how much of what we are is us, and how much is what’s around us? who are you if you forget everything that makes you you?

these are the questions that anne de marcken explores in it lasts forever and then it’s over. and there are, predictably, no answers to be found, because the afterlife here is less of a heaven or a hell than it is an endless purgatory. in it lasts forever, marcken’s real focus is abjection in all its forms, and the abject takes shape after shape: a grieving would-be mother who can’t move on from her grief becomes a cannibalistic zombie who takes pleasure in stalking and devouring a teenager. rich sensory descriptions rife with putrid rot. decomposing limbs that fall off and are fed to zombie children or pursued by wild dogs. all the ordinary triggers of disgust in blood and guts and vomit, and endless corpses - man, child, animal, bird - reduced down to decaying matter. everything in this book is either dead or dying.

it would be easy to dismiss this as being a lot of pretty words put together to be pretty, but there’s really nothing very pretty about marcken’s prose. consider her description of a swarm of bees:

“It was solid and liquid and crawling and black and shimmering. It was the body of one thing made out of the bodies of other things. One animal made out of other animals. It was a shimmering black octopus made of bees. Dripping bees. It kept reshaping itself into a new octopus. Bulbous head and webbed body and tentacles.“

or her description of an overgrown street:

“Up narrow streets made narrower by encroaching weeds and blackberry vines. Rhododendrons and roses gone feral. Apple and fig trees heavy with fruit that will fall and rot. The fleshy citrus scent of magnolia blooms the size of baseball gloves.“

she employs repetition and run-on sentences to great effect. reading her prose feels at times like a drone not unlike her protagonist’s zombie state and endless hunger, and she dips in and out of humanity, varying from highly sparse to deeply emotional. but it all goes back to death and to hunger: in marcken’s post-apocalyptic afterlife what keeps her protagonist alive is her fears and guilt and hunger and disgust and more than anything her grief, which is endlessly fed by her fear and guilt and hunger and disgust. her sensory details are full of smells and tastes, reflecting her protagonist’s neverending hunger: everything in this book is liable to be consumed.

lots of great episodes in this book and i love how marcken employs a fragmentary narrative, but i find myself particularly struck by the moment where the protagonist comes across an old woman feeding her arm to a zombie child. we later learn that the woman is the child’s grandmother, but the sense of sacrifice is there from the beginning. and it’s this, more than her killings and devouring of raw flesh, that disgusts and scares her: this is what she runs and escapes from. “She opens her eyes and is looking directly at me. In the moment it takes for her to register what I am, in the moment before I turn and run, something passes between us. A recognition. What is unbearable is already too much. How can there be more?” the sacrifice of a grandmother keeping her grandson alive and the endless grief of a mother who has lost her unborn child stand in opposition to each other, and it’s the recognition of the self in another that causes our protagonist to flee.

i’ll admit marcken did lose me a little bit towards the end with the commune of living human survivors lynching the zombies, which just felt a little hard to match tonally with the overwhelming loneliness of the novella so far, but the last chapter brought it back to the place i loved at the start. what makes us who we are? grief. and love, but mostly grief. and disgust and hunger and fear, but mostly grief. that persists even when you have lost everything else, even your name and your arm and your head.