The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed

How do you picture the end of days? ‘When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world,’ muses the unnamed narrator in It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over. ‘I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction.’ But no: ‘The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same,’ she continues from her vantage point in an afterlife, brought into vivid existence by Anne de Marcken.

It’s telling that the author’s biography states that she ‘lives in the United States on unceded land of the Coast Salish people’. You could say It Lasts Forever takes place on similarly unceded space if you substitute the undead for early settlers and the living for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific north-west coast. That’s right: this is a zombie novel – albeit a Fitzcarraldo zombie novel, which means that the prose is exquisite and the form is inventive, and there is plenty of white space between fragments of text and a handful of doodles.