M.G. Allan's New Novel, 'Last Night', Offers Moving Meditation On Life And Death

It’s been said that we begin to die the moment we’re born. While that may be a poetic expression about what many consider a taboo subject, death is an inescapable truth everyone must eventually confront, both for ourselves, and for those we care about. After all, few, if any, traumas in life can be as debilitating as the passing of a loved one, and the lingering emotional anguish accompanying such a loss can be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.

It is rare to find someone who speaks about death as intimately as South Carolina-based queer author Mark Allan Gunnells (writing as M.G. Allan) does in the new JMS Books release, Last Night. A semi-autobiographical take on the passing of his mother, Gunnells’ latest proves to be an earnest, poignant, and powerful meditation on life, love, and the dying process.

The plot is straightforward: an unnamed narrator (referred to only as ‘Gem’ in flashbacks), has moved his mother, Linda, into the house that he shares with his husband, Gregg. Linda is in the final throes of Stage Four lung cancer, and with all medical options exhausted, Gem and Gregg have agreed to see her through to the end via in-home hospice care. As the novel opens, Gem learns from Linda’s nurse that his mother’s condition is deteriorating faster than expected, and that this in fact could be her last night on earth. For the remainder of the evening Gem desperately tries to bring Linda some measure of comfort while dealing with his own complex, often conflicting emotions. Interspersed between these scenes in the present are episodes from Linda’s past, extending from her childhood and moving forward in five- to ten-year intervals, detailing her life in all it’s messy human glory, her triumphs and tragedies, her choices, regrets, and accomplishments.

Last Night undeniably represents Gunnells’ best work to date. While his fiction has been split in recent years between horror (2B, Lucid, Imposter Syndrome) and his more literary, coming-of-age releases (The Advantaged, Triangle), with Last Night he reaches a level of depth most authors seldom attain, the root of which is his raw, unflinching honesty. In fact, Last Night’s nearest creative predecessor isn’t another book, but rather the 2001 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “The Body”, which deals with the unexpected passing of Buffy’s mother, Joyce. Like that episode, Last Night isn’t about the grief following death, but the immediate physicality of it. Gunnells hides nothing regarding Linda’s insidious illness, and describes at length the seemingly endless array of medicines, equipment, and procedures implemented simply to keep her breathing. The flashbacks are likewise unsanitized, and the sections highlighting Linda’s abusive marriage to a violent, drug-addicted alcoholic are among the novel’s roughest.

Broaching such heavy themes doesn’t mean that Last Night is depressing or nihilistic, however. Unexpected glints of wry humor lurk throughout, particularly in the dialogue exchanges between Linda and Gem, and in scenes involving Linda and her lifelong friend Gertie. Similarly, the bond shared by Linda and her son as Gem blossoms into a successful man and writer is touching to read about. Above all, though, is the novel’s paradoxically life-affirming notion that death, in the most practical sense, need not be the end, that keeping a person’s memory alive, telling their story and sharing their wisdom provides an immortality all its own. It’s a transcendent, universal truth Gunnells illustrates most clearly at the book’s end when, after Linda’s inevitable demise, we see her as a newborn infant full of possibility, demonstrating that birth, life, and death are cyclically interconnected.

Heartfelt and heart-breaking, Last Night manages to showcase both the strength and fragile beauty of the human condition, addressing an oft-painful topic with sincerity, clarity, and openness, and for those reasons and many more I feel compelled to bestow it the full 5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. After finishing this book I was reminded of what the character Death from The Sandman graphic novels once said: “You lived what anyone gets. You got a lifetime.” Don’t we all.