It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

— — 21st Century
This edition printed in:

A black cat looks up from the shadows. She is sitting beside a small plush pumpkin toy and a green softcover book with a crow on it.

Spooky Season is Here at Last

October is finally here and I have a whole bunch of spooky books saved up just for the occasion. I’m excited to start bringing out the holiday content and diving into it. However, this year with the amount of things we have packed into the month, I can admit to being a bit worried that it will pass us by before we really have the chance to savour it. Already we’re late with a few things because of deadlines. Notably changing the sign on the door and figuring out the last straying bits of fall maintenance.

A fluffy black cat looks up into the light. A paperback book and a pumpkin toy sit by her tail.

A New Twist

When I picked up Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, I was a bit skeptical. No offence to de Marcken, but zombies have never been my favourite monster or plot. Usually there’s a lot of gore but not a terrible amount of substance. However, this slim novel is very different. The narrator is undead, but the story isn’t about gore or about creative deaths. Instead, it is about the narrator struggling to hang onto the last pieces of herself, and the last memories of the woman she loved.

A neon-green softcover books sits in the light beside a toy jack-o-lantern. On the cover, the title and author name are fit inside the silhouette of a crow.

About the Self

Ultimately this isn’t a novel about zombies or the apocalypse or about the fate of humanity. Instead it’s about what is left when everything else is gone and what parts of the self compose who we truly are. Who we love and who loves us and the memory of what it’s like to be loved. The places where we felt the most connected to ourselves. This is a melancholy book of longing and grief in the scraps of not just an external landscape but an internal one.

A long-haired black cat with yellow eyes looks upwards, her face in shadow and the light just catching the edges of her sides and tail. A book and a pumpkin toy sit beside her int he light.

Mortality and Connection

Probably what stands out in the midst of the spookier aspects of the novel is the quest for connection even in dangerous times and even when it can be deadly. Characters still have a need to reach out, help others, know others, make a life amongst others. The undead congregate in a hotel. The living in an encampment in the wilderness. Even in the worst of times, humans need other humans.

A long-haired black cat sits primly at the edge of a diffuse light. By her tail are a small jack-o-lantern toy and a paperback back titled It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over.

The other presence in It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is death. It’s often violent and it is lingering around every corner and sometimes it is unattached to physical death. De Marcken masterfully tackles an idea as complex as mortality, examining it from multiple angles and with a variety of tones and treatments. It’s beautiful.

It Lasts Forever and then It's Over by Anne De Marcken is a neon-green soft cover book with the words on the cover fit inside the black silhouette of a crow.

We Need Pumpkins Soon

Other thing we’re slightly late on? Pumpkins! The local farm we usually went to has stopped selling them but there’s a micro-farm just around the corner that my lovely spouse is excited to try. I’m a bit sad about the loss of the country drive with the car full of pumpkins — but I suppose that I will have to adjust.

A black cat curls over the edge of a book with a crow on it — It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne De Marcken. A plush pumpkin toy sits beside them.
by S. Hargrave

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