It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

[psocoptera]

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.