“I say, ‘I think our hunger is what we have instead of what we’ve lost.’”

When hunger is grief is loss is sadness is yearning is love. Is motherhood… Like our narrator says, when the world ends, it does so quietly. Everything about this post-apocalyptic world is quiet and a caricature of itself somehow. What are these zombies if they’re not really dead people? Since dead people are actually dead? Why do zombies want to eat when they have no desire to live, because they are not alive?

I love the small vignettes we see of this world’s living population. There isn’t much that separates their listlessness and wandering from the zombies themselves, though they like to think otherwise. I loved the interactions between the narrator and the old lady, who visited her crucified zombie daughter and keeps her grandson in a cabin. I think companionship is human, and that doesn’t change in death. Because in death we are still human. I think we have to be.

I’m blown away by de Marcken’s prose. Everything is abstract, but somehow I understand the underlying intent there, or at least what I’m supposed to be feeling.

I drop [the crow] in the hole.

I picture it hurtling through an old pneumatic tube system and launching into clear sky.

I picture it opening like parachute.

I picture it flying away.

[…]

Naked. One-armed. Crowless.

A review by maises It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken

“I say, ‘I think our hunger is what we have instead of what we’ve lost.’”

A review by maises
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken