Kavan's second collection of stories, I Am Lazarus, was published in March 1945; she described an advance copy as looking ‘rather a mean and insignificant little starved war baby of a book’. Continuing the experimental style of Asylum Piece in their hybrid of realism and fantasy, these stories assimilate the atmosphere and incidents of the Second World War into the dystopian world she introduced in the earlier collection, presenting tales of psychiatric patients in the third person alongside nameless, misanthropic first-person narrators. Bringing together stories of psychiatric internment with those of bombing in wartime London, the collection shows how these extreme situations touch and resonate with one another. The global conflict heightens her characters’ sense of inevitable doom, but the crisis of representation with which Kavan grappled was the same; if profound depression and the asylum experience necessitated new and experimental representations of reality, so too did life under aerial bombardment. These aesthetic challenges were shared by many other British writers and this phase of Kavan's career aligns her writing with that of her contemporaries who likewise drew on hallucinatory imagery, gothic trope and experimental narrative temporality in their war writing, especially Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom and James Hanley. The intensity of the aesthetic struggle to adequately represent total war carried an associated burden of ethical and political responsibility, exemplified by Cyril Connolly's statement in Horizon (contradicting his position early in the conflict) that the ‘role of writers today, when every free nation and every free man and woman is threatened by the Nazi war-machine, is a matter of supreme importance’.

For Kavan, the political impetus of her writing of madness and its treatment became more explicit and was further inflected by her pacifist views. Her continuing focus on marginalised individuals, running counter to narratives of wartime camaraderie, framed madness as a form of political resistance.

The literal and metaphorical darkness and the disrupted experience of time experienced by the depressed narrator of the Asylum Piece stories recrudesce in the enforced wartime blackout of the Lazarus stories and, as elsewhere in Blitz writing, the blackout is both a physical reality and a metaphor for a restricted relationship with time.