It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over - Anne de Marcken
I'm slipping this one in right before the deadline, meaning that I've managed to read all but one of the books shortlisted for this year's Ursula K Le Guin Prize before the winner is announced later today. And I'm very glad I did, because of all the books on the shortlist this is my favourite and I hope it wins.
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over won the 2022 Novel Prize alongside Jonathan Buckley's Tell (which is shortlisted for this year's Goldsmiths Prize and therefore also on my reading list before the end of the year). The Novel Prize awards unpublished literary fiction that "explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style" - a similar aim to the Goldsmiths Prize, so I can understand why Tell has been nominated for the latter after winning the former. That goal also seems to align with the goals of the Le Guin, and it's nice to see them recognise this book.
I'm a big lover of fragmented narratives and have come to really enjoy "mosaic novels" over the past few years. I'm also a big fan of writers blending the conventions of literary fiction with other genres. It should be no surprise then that It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over - a fragmentwd mosaic novel of literary horror that approaches the zombie genre in a very tender way I haven't really seen before, aside from maybe Handling The Undead - immediately became one of my favourite reads of the year. It's a short novella that I could easily have powered through in an hour or so but I deliberately took my time with it because I didn't want it to end.
There are some moments of real horror here, as you'd expect from a zombie novel - an old woman slowly feeding her own arm to her grandson is the moment that sticks out for me the most - juxtaposed with some surprising humour, very tender moments, and an exploring what it means to be alive, what it means to be dead, what it means to be human. There's some stuff about gender and transition going on in here that I'm not qualified to unpack, too, but which struck me as being very powerful even if I can't fully explain why.
Read this at your earliest convenience.