Matthew Ted's Reviews > It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

37th book of 2024.

Weirdly, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine the other day about how women eating people seems to be in vogue right now. So I waved this book in her face and said, You won't believe it, this is about a woman eating people (she's a zombie!). She replied, "God forbid women have hobbies."

Trust Fitzcarraldo to publish a zombie book. If it's one thing you'd expect never to work, it's zombies. The only writer who has written a zombie book that I can think of, and one of the few writers I trust to write a zombie book, is the inimitable Vladimir Sorokin; but, you know what, de Marcken gives it a good go. This is a "funny", first person narrative about a girl who is a zombie. Her arm falls off in the first line of the book. The world is a wreck, humans run around avoiding zombies and zombies, when they're not hungry, avoid humans.

When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land.
That was the future. This is now.
The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don't try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

There is a horrible moment in the book where the narrator spots a little old lady, alive, going into a little shed. On the other side of an inner wall, the narrator hears a small voice, "I'm hungry." The old lady reassures the little voice before putting a wooden spoon in her mouth and sticking her already-stump of an arm through a sort of cat-flap. The sound of noisy eating commences, and the old lady cries. Her grandson, a zombie, is on the other side of the wall. She is slowly feeding him her arm so he doesn't go hungry.