It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, Anne de Marcken, 2024 novella. It won the 2024 Le Guin prize and most of the rest of the shortlist were 2023 works, but I double-checked that this one was 2024. This is a literary-fiction zombie story from the perspective of a zombie, an extended meditation on grief and loss, and it's really good. (If that's the sort of thing you like. It's the sort of thing *I* like.) I think with this sort of thing there's always a question of how sfnal vs fantastical vs dreamlike the author wants the world to feel, and this one slants into magical realism with the addition of other "impossible" happenings beyond the zombies (the moon is always full, a character whose body is destroyed reappears intact, someone has a particular item it doesn't make sense for them to have, etc) which I found kind of distracting. Like, I thought the whole thing hit hardest when it was playing relatively straight with the zombie premise, and if the author is just going to throw in other random stuff then for me that muddles or undermines it. But it was still really good.

The Last Dragon of the East

The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.

I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.

My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.

2024 Locus List

The 2024 Locus Recommendations came out. Some quick thoughts: they think Malka Older's Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is a novel not a novella. No Sapling Cage. No Glass Houses. No Forbidden Book. Gosh I should do something about short fiction soon. Hrm.