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<p>Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.</p>
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<p>One of the central things a review is supposed to do is say who might like a thing, and genre is one of the major ways of doing that. So right away we have the question: what genre is <em>Last Exit</em>? When I was much younger and less concerned with being fair, I drew the line between dark fantasy and horror at my own taste: if I liked it, it was dark fantasy; if I did not, it was horror. <em>Last Exit</em>, then, is dark fantasy.</p>
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<p>I grew up, though, and I recognized that that was not very helpful to other people, nor even, necessarily, to myself. (Growing up and recognizing when you've oversimplified is not irrelevant to this book! but onward.)</p>
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<p>So: horror is the genre that is attempting to horrify, to terrify? Well then. Some sections of <em>Last Exit</em> are very certainly horror. Because there are scenes of rot and decay both literal and moral, there are scenes of monsters too relentless to flee effectively, there are good people snuffed out not just in fangs but in the worst of the culture that you will recognize yourself to live in right now--the kind of horror that you can't escape by reminding yourself that zombies aren't real, because it's not about zombies, it's about the worst thoughts that whisper in the minds of Americans. <em>Last Exit</em>, then, is horror.</p>
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<p>But what if, instead, horror is about worldview. What if whether a story is horror or not depends on the hostility of the universe in which it is set--a universe that is out to get the protagonists at every turn, a universe in which good deeds and intentions will always turn to nothing, a universe in which all shelter is inherently temporary and the permanent condition is always, eventually, fear and despair--well--if that's the case, is <em>Last Exit</em> horror or fantasy? That...is a spoiler. Because that's one of the central questions of the book. That is, in fact, one of the major things the characters are wrestling with. Can we get to something better, can we make something better--is it possible.</p>
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<p>But what's the book <em>about</em>. Oh, well then. Zelda and Sal, Sarah, Ish, and Ramón are college friends who have learned a knack of passing between alternate worlds, and they were determined to find or make the way to something better. And they failed. And in that failure, Sal was lost, and has stayed lost for ten years. They've grown apart, each into their separate ways of coping, but that no longer looks sustainable. Now they have to find Sal again and fix what they broke or--well. The details of that "or" look pretty nasty not just for them but for the entire array of worlds they can manage to see. It's full of road trips and first loves and growing into yourself and figuring out who your friends are when you've been apart for awhile and recoiling from all the worst things you can't pretend aren't out there in the world, and also it has a couple of places where it made me cry hard enough the entire front of my body seized up at once. (Good job, <em>Gladstone</em>.) Is it dark, yes. Is it <em>only</em> dark, no, absolutely not. It is really, really, really good. For me it was also a book I described as a full-contact sport. This book is not going to fight Marquis of Queensbury Rules with you, and if you want a gentle book at this exact moment, maybe keep this one on the pile until you're ready for something that isn't. Because it isn't. Not everything is. And this one really needed not to be, to get where it's going in the end.</p>
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LAST EXIT is a visceral, electric reflection of our world, its crushing despairs and glimmers of hope, wrapped up in a fast-moving plot and fantastical alternative worlds. Its characters are strongly realised, and I think almost any reader could see parts of themselves and their experiences in the writing. LAST EXIT is at the same time an indictment of our world, a call to action to improve it, and a crescendo of hope that maybe we actually can. Possibly Gladstone’s best writing yet; an absolute must-read.

Gladstone’s writing slips between character points of view, between present and past, between a character’s internal thoughts and treatises on the state of the modern world as effortlessly as his characters slip between worlds. He weaves together character and place and theme, truth and pain and fear, magic and maths and make-believe, creating a tapestry that speaks of our modern world and our history at the same time.

LAST EXIT is a book of this exact moment. It couldn’t have been written at any other point in history, and I’m curious to see how we look back on it in the future. Despite very obvious fantasy features – alternative worlds, a magic power to jump between them and play in pockets of chance and luck, an immortal faceless cowboy hunting down our heroes – to me it feels like it belongs just as well in general / contemporary fiction. This is a post-coming-of-age story, a not-quite-new-adult-anymore story, a let’s-look-at-how-fucked-up-our-world-is story as much as it’s a fantastical avert-the-end-of-the-world story.

I fall back on a quote Gladstone gave in an old Reddit AMA when discussing his Craft Sequence, and it feels very relevant here too: “It uses fantasy to talk about our weird modern world in the same way lots of books use fantasy to approach the medieval world.” LAST EXIT is doing the same thing in a very different way.

Having sat with LAST EXIT for a few weeks, I truly think this is Gladstone’s best work so far. If you’ve read his backlist, you can see ideas and themes echoing in LAST EXIT; his writing style is familiar, with a distinct voice that melds almost painfully real characters and their idiosyncrasies with soaring prose about the world and humanity and morality. And there’s always an edge of humour, of course.

Gladstone likes to reflect on the world we live in and reflect it back to us in ways we might not expect. And even when confronting the worst of humanity, of capitalism, of our industrialised and digitally surveilled world, he finds a nugget of hope like quartz glittering in granite. He has a deep belief in people, in connections and relationships, and how we can build a better world together despite the structural forces against us. Through much of the book, our main characters are almost drowning in their hopelessness, in their disbelief that they might actually be able to win this time. After all, last time, when they were young and fierce and felt indestructible, they lost. They lost hard. They know the darkness that lurks at the edges of the world, the darkness that is slipping through the cracks in society and in people, and they don’t know if or how they can possibly beat it back.

But they’re damn well going to try.

It is the characters that shine brightest to me. Gladstone’s characterisation is always superb, and LAST EXIT is no exception. Each character brings something different to the story, while reflecting a different facet of the themes back at us. Each character has their own fears, which lead them down specifics paths to particular ends. Each of them wrestles differently with the modern age and their place in it. They have their own despairs and their own slivers of hope. Their very presence in the book is them fighting against that despair, clinging to that hope, trying against all the odds to make a better world.

Gladstone has a talent in quickly sketching out a character, so you immediately know and feel connected to them, then spending the rest of the book filling the blank spaces. Each character has a strong presence from their first few lines. You learn about them in pieces, from their own POV and in how they are perceived by others. In a story of big moments, crazy car chases, and outrageous descriptions, it is some of the quiet descriptions that have stayed with me since I read. I particularly love this description of Sarah: “She wore makeup now, just a touch, giving her face the crisp finish of an edited sentence.” From this single sentence, you know so much about Sarah and how she presents herself to the world. Gladstone needs to teach a masterclass in characterisation.

Even Sean, a hotel worker with just a handful of point of view paragraphs, is fully rounded and has agency; his musings on the divides in America, his desire to believe in the goodness of his community, and ultimately his sacrifice have stayed with me in the weeks since I read LAST EXIT.

LAST EXIT is deeply American, Ordinarily when I say that about a book, I don’t mean it as a compliment. LAST EXIT is the exception. Books are often American by default—that itself isn’t a problem, necessarily, when authors are American writing about America. However, the Americanisms don’t translate well and publishers rarely try to localise books the way they do ‘foreign’ books for American audiences. In fantasy, it just feels lazy. Even Gladstone falls into this trap in other books. References to ‘blocks’ and ‘cops’ in Kavekana stick out dramatically, not to mention the deeply American law school system that teaches the Craft itself.

LAST EXIT, however, is deliberately and inextricably American. While many of the themes are applicable to much of the world, it has America woven into its DNA. To me, its setting reads like fantasy – and I mean that in a good way. Often American writers assume a knowledge of the country that many of us don’t have. I don’t know the vast highways and expanses of cornfields, the particular hopelessness of forgotten rural communities, the loss of an American dream. I know it exists, but I’ve never seen it. Yet, in Gladstone’s writing I feel it. This book is a meditation on America. Even the faceless villain, a menacing cowboy right out of an old Western film – down to the ahistorical fact that said cowboy is white – is distinctly American. He represents a false story America has told and the faceless face of historical white violence and oppression against communities of colour. He is the worst you can find in people – and is defeated by a young, diverse gang of friends.

LAST EXIT doesn’t shy away from the historical and present day horrors faced by communities of colour. I am both white and non-American, so I’m hardly qualified to argue how well or poorly this was handled; nonetheless, it was immensely refreshing to read it in a modern US fantasy novel, neither ignored nor siloed away in one piece of exposition. It is a key part of the book, and LAST EXIT would not be complete were this removed. I look forward to reading reviews by people from the demographics represented.

LAST EXIT is a story about failure, and loss, and fear, and hope. It’s a story about picking up the pieces of who we thought we were and the world we thought we lived in, and trying to make a better one. It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and confronting the reality we actually live in. It’s a story about finding strength together, not alone. None of our characters could save the world alone. Zelda tried, for ten years. But together, with their strengths and weaknesses woven together, maybe they can.

Get your hands of on a copy in any way you can. This is a book that demands to be read, and read right now. If this is a sign of how Gladstone’s writing has developed and matured, I look forward to what he comes up with next.

Zelda has spent the last ten years paying for a mistake messing with powers she shouldn’t have touched. Those ten years were full of cleaning up after that mistake, terrible jobs with worse pay, and no one ever saying thank you. But, at the beginning of Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, Zelda has a chance to put things right again. All she has to do is get her friends on board with her (not actually a) plan to save the world and her long-lost love.

Last Exit is a melancholy book. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since this book is set at the end of the world. (I might have recommended some trimming at several points in this book.) Zelda and her friends’ only hope is reclaiming their old magic. Except, they never call it magic. To them it’s math or spin or a knack. When they were in college, Zelda, Sal, Ish, Ramón, and Sarah figured out how to use uncertainty and chance to step out of our world and into alternate ones. They went on all kinds of adventures until, one day, they went too far. Sal was lost and rot started to seem out into all the worlds. Hence, Zelda’s ten-year penance.

We jump from character to character over the course of most of Last Exit, learning everyone’s backstories and their regrets. We also learn more about the alternate worlds and the rot. A lot of these worlds are fairly bleak. There are differences, but it seems like our band of would-be heroes keep stumbling on worlds that have fallen from some kind of golden age. Now it’s all references to cannibal gangs and roving drones and there is a really thrilling scene out of Mad Max. We never learn what made all those civilizations fall, but there are hints that it was either overreaching and someone unleashed something unspeakable or because someone took too much control and stiffled all the life out of the place.

I’m trying hard not to knock this book, but it’s not until near the end that the pace picks up. Once Zelda gets the gang together and a truly terrifying baddie shows up, Last Exit really takes off. The melancholy (which never really goes away) starts to resolve into a big question about what it means to save the world. Does it mean preserving what we have (at the cost of our privacy)? Does it mean sacrificing safety for a chance at a brand new life? And, perhaps most interestingly, what does it mean to save the world when we struggle so much to even envision a better world?

I had to DNF this one for now. I actually love the premise and the writing is beautiful, but to be honest I don't think I'm in the best mental space to handle it right now. My plan is to return when I feel a little more mentally prepared to handle the weight of Zelda's grief. Again, still think the premise is very clever and I adore the writing.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Max Gladstone's Last Exit, and I would be lying if I said I have a well-formed opinion about the story Gladstone told. The biggest takeaway I have from the novel is that Gladstone's ambition is truly a marvel. A genre mashup of sci-fi, fantasy, western, horror, etc. could become an unwieldly mess in the hands of a lesser writer (heck, in the hands of a seasoned writer, too), but Gladstone anchors this story onto the group of friends he has created. The depth of his characters keeps this train on its tracks, becoming a beautiful found family tale amidst the end of the world.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for providing me with an ARC.

I'm giving this 4 stars even though I DNF'd it pretty early, because this book is (probably) amazing, but it's just what I'm in the mood for right now. The blurb makes it seem like some fast paced, dark urban fantasy but the writing style is SO different from what I imagined. It's written in very dense, metaphorical prose. It's beautiful, but it takes a LOT of time and concentration to understand.

Here is Max Gladstone’s recipe for a Last Exit cocktail:
• One part fervent, confident intensity of young adulthood
• One part fever dream (or nightmare) of magic and alternate worlds
• Add bitters in the form of mid-life fears, regrets, and resignations born out of both trauma and simple aging
• Splash of Mad Max
• Zest of Zelazny
• Stir with a rusty spoon of entropy
• Pour slowly into a clear (eyed) glass filled one-quarter with the crushed ice-dreams of Americana myth and rimmed with sugar for a little bit of innocent sweetness
• Serve with a shot of hope (the kind that burns on the way down)

(And don’t forget to tip your bartender — you’re going to be a regular)


Gladstone’s newest is a darkly compelling and intense work, following a group of friends who met at college, where they learned to manipulate a math-y kind of magic of uncertainty that lets them slip into alternate realities (“the alts”) — “Broken worlds. One after another. Beautiful, some of them, but sick. Burned down to the bone … we never found anything better.” Instead, they encountered “the rot”, something “beyond the walls of our world … old and hungry and always looking for a way in … We thought maybe the rot was what was wrong, with our world, with all of them.” And so, with the optimism, confidence, and/or desperation of youth, they tried to go “further [to] a crossroads … A place where worlds meet. We thought if we got there, we would have the power to change everything. Fix the world.” But they failed to reach the Crossroads and in the attempt lost Sal, the love of Zelda’s life.

That happened a decade ago and since then they’ve all moved on, losing contact with one another, dealing with their trauma in different ways, and employing their personal “knack” (a kind of very narrow and individualized magic they picked up from their travels) to ease their way into a “normal life.” All save for Zelda, the novel’s main protagonist, who has been spending the past ten years doing what she can to seal the cracks, heal the wounds, push the rot back. But now it threatens to overwhelm the world and so gets the gang get back together for one more attempt at the Crossroads, along with Sal’s young and still idealistic cousin June. But after ten years, they’re not the same people they once were, and things in the alts seem to have gotten even worse. Not to mention the deadly cowboy that is pursuing them, an agent of the rot perhaps, or maybe something worse.

Gladstone relates the narrative via two timelines. In one we watch the group of friends form, learn how to travel, traverse the alts, and eventually we learn what happened that day they tried to reach the Crossroads, lost Sal, and stopped interacting with each other. The other tracks Zelda and then the group in present time as they reform, reenter the alts, and make yet another run at getting to the Crossroads, pursued, as noted, by some malevolent force in the form of a cowboy. The shifts between timelines are always smoothly handled, and the structure does an excellent job of increasing the tension and suspense. We know, for instance, that the first timeline ends in tragedy so they’re this awful/wonderful sense of dread as we move forward. Meanwhile, the present timeline has a sense of urgency thanks to the approaching apocalypse, and added elements of tension that come both from within (prickly interrelationships) and without (the cowboy). All of this set against a backdrop of truly creepy, horrific worlds whose denizens range from voracious mechanical spiders to a Max central casting biker crew. On a simple plot level, Last Exit is an excellent work of fiction, one made all the more so by the sharply vivid characterization that makes each member of the gang feel fully alive and uniquely themselves, uniquely the result of their experiences despite that some of those experiences were shared ones. Not all were or could be, and that makes all the difference.

But there’s a lot more going on here than a well plotted and peopled novel. Gladstone is also dissecting the American mythos via a number of well-trod symbols: the cowboy, the car/roadtrip, the action film. At various points he rips aside the veil to reveal the ugly reality below, noting how “In America, you never could walk without stepping on corpses” or that “what will you find when you peel back this nation’s skin but blood, oceans of blood.” Meanwhile, June on multiple occasions points out what she calls “some wrongheaded, individualist horseshit,” the bs behind “thinking this is some kind of action movie, like one dude crawling around in the air ducts gonna save the day.” Gladstone gets overt about this sort of American mythologizing as well, as when Zelda wonders:

If you remembered something hard enough, could you make it true? … Hell, this was America after all. Revisionist history was as much the national pastime as baseball. Rapist slaveholders became civic saints. Men who fought to keep people enslaved, who insisted slavery was the point of the war, lived to see their own children and grandchildren proclaim slave had not to do with it.

It's not just the collective national myth under the scope though, as Gladstone also casts a sharp eye on our individual means of hiding from the truth, the way, “So much of being a certain kind of American — blithe and faithful, cheerily persuaded of your ultimate justice — depended on a cognitively expensive kind of unseeing. Ignoring the evidence of your senses. Believe the world otherwise.” Or, to give it both a metaphorical and, this being fantasy, perhaps not-so-metaphorical cast:

A serpent gnaws at the roots of the word … It knows we’re up here, drinking coffee and wondering whether it’s okay to turn the AC down one more degree — sure, it’s speeding up the death of the plant, but it’s hot now … It knows we do not feel the weight of the world pressing on our backs. It knows. And, and it’s pissed … You know this. I know this. But we forget, most of the time. You have to forget, to live anything like a human life. You make yourself forget.

It’s a book about politics. It’s a book about the idealism of youth, when you think “That if we worked hard and trusted each other and believed, we might find or make a world that wasn’t so … this way.” It’s a book about aging and how you end up looking like how “the cartilage started to wear out … [and] if the world just did that to you, seeped out what you’d been and left holes behind.”

It’s a book about climate change. And social justice. About class. About how “Ramón, a first-generation college student, and brown, Zelda from a family of bookish zealot weirdos up a gravel road in South Carolina, neither of them with any money … [found] there were things they didn’t know, things the kids who came from prep schools … seemed to have learned without being taught … For example, if you didn’t know what to write for a paper, you could just go ask the teacher … or you could ask for an extension.” It’s a book about taking responsibility for your own little part of the world no matter how overwhelming it all seems, because “There’s always a tank rolling down some street. You can’t do everything — but that doesn’t forgive you for not doing what you can.”

It's a book about trauma and loneliness and otherness and marginalization and fear and desire and finding out who you are and then finding out who you become and it’s about finding people who will see you through all that and share all that and it’s about losing them or some of them and maybe even finding some of them again. It’s about feeling “despair. Who wouldn’t if they were paying attention? But you didn’t feel it all the time. You walled it up with a purpose. With friendship. With vows and work. And you reminded yourself that it was not just you who felt this way.”

It's an intense pedal-to-the-metal roadtrip action novel through hells both exterior and interior; a quietly contemplative, introspective, philosophical, tale; a love story; a coming-of-age story, a biting work of political and social criticism. One might even say it contains multitudes.

And all of them good.

Reading "Last Exit" is like reading a 400 page poem -- you have to go slow because each word works hard to carry more than its individual weight, and each sentence is doing its best to say at least three things. Example: "Sarah was a doctor now, and she'd been Sarah all along, so [Ish] didn't mention the dying man." Thing one: It's telling us that there's a man who's dying, Sarah will go to help if she knows about it, and Ish needs her not to. Thing two: It's telling us a lot about Sarah, things we'll need to know going forward. Thing three: It's telling us a lot about Ish, also things we'll need to know going forward. And these aren't isolated cases; I took this at random, because nearly every sentence on every page carries extra weight like this. The result is a book that is much bigger than its word count, because reading it requires not just factual understanding but active interpretation at all times. It took a lot longer to read than my usual pace, because I had to go so much slower; I'd often read what felt like fifteen, twenty pages, and then look up to see I'd gone only 1% further.

And for the record, that's a good thing! That said, I think the blurb is a bit misleading. It's definitely not a book if you're looking to read a light-hearted romp where the old gang gets back together to travel through alternate realities and save the world, but it's a book to read if you want to actually have to sit down and think about what that would actually <i>mean</i> for the people involved.

It's a post-apocalyptic story set in our current world -- which is to say, it forces the reader to acknowledge that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic world, that we have caused apocalypses to so many individual cultures and societies already. (By which I mean: A post-apocalyptic setting could be, for example, one where we observe the scrappy survivors on a world after an alien invasion that wiped out most of humanity and replaced a lot of our cities and cultures with their own -- but have humans not done this to other human cultures many a time)? It sends the characters traveling through other worlds -- rather, other <i>Americas</i>, this is important -- where the apocalypses may seem more real and fantastical, but it makes you acknowledge that our own is there too. It's about the world rotting, and specifically about it rotting at the core of the myth of America the Great, as well as the myth of privilege (whiteness and heterosexuality), and the things people will do not just to uphold the myth of privilege in America, but the things they'll do to try to <i>belong</i> to that myth, whether or not they actually can. It's a story about having to face the fact that there is no good end to things as they are now, so you're going to have to look at how things could be changed so they're not <i>things as they are now</i>.

It's queer, it's brutally sharp, it's a quest story about trying to find a girlfriend who has probably become some sort of eldritch god between worlds, and it's... odd, lyrical, moving, disturbing.

If there's any flaw to it -- and I'm not sure I can even call this a flaw, exactly, because it's very deliberate -- it's that some of the cast aren't likeable, and not only do they not like each other much now in the get-back-together-for-one-last-job stage, even when we read flashbacks to when they were carefree youths together, they didn't seem to like each other then (not really, not as who they really are). So it's less about revisiting a group of found family and more about people who may not get along under most circumstances being the only ones who have figured out the impossibility of traveling between realities and thus are bonded by the atrocities they see there. But there are things which can grow from that, too.

I'm not sure I always <i>liked</i> the experience of reading Last Exit, but even when I didn't, it was always really, really good. I can't criticize any part of its writing or meaning, and my only caution would be to ignore the overtones of the blurb and instead be ready to read and be open to something a lot heavier, because it's got a lot to say if you're in a place to slow down and take it in.

Alright. Lets talk about Last Exit, a standalone novel from Max Gladstone. A story about people jumping between worlds and back again. Sometimes those worlds are physical, real things that show us different versions of ourselves. And sometimes those words are all in the mind, living out the story of what was and what could have been, the loss of promise, the loss of pride and what you’re willing to sacrifice, or hold onto, and why.

Which is all a bit vague, but believe me when I tell you, first of all, that Max Gladstone is one of the finest writers working in science fiction today, and secondly, that even for him, this is a damn fine book.It’s one that will challenge you, make you think. But also one which will make you feel, from the razored pain in your gut as inevitable tragedies roll on, to the searing hope of the struggle against them. And, you know, it’s also got a story in there sharp enough and smart enough that I was found reading it at 3am, even though I knew I was getting up with a tired child a few hours later. That may make me an idiot, but it speaks to the power of the prose between the covers on this one.


Zelda is, at least arguably, the protagonist. At university, she learned to skip between parallel realities, and taught her friends. They were an adventuring party of questers, heroe sin search of a grail - looking to turn back a tide of rot which was shattering the worlds they found. And then, at the last, at hideous cost, they failed. The survivors scattered to the winds, to live their lives, to forget what they’d sene, or to prepare for it. Only Zelda was left, walking the ways between the worlds, a penance and a punishment in one. But now, things have changed. Now, Zelda has to get her team back together, despite the losses, despite the scars, despite history or lack of it. Or their world is going to end.


The book promises a lot in that premise, and I’ll say this, it absolutely, one hundred percent delivers. From shattered dystopian hellscapes filled with flesh-eating annites, to Mad-Max style road-warriors, from bandit camps to eldritch castles, we can see a whole host of worlds other than our own, imaginatively constructed, as real as we feel them to be, and as horrifying, too. This is a book showing us our future in a handful of dust. And our own world has that lived in feel, too. The glint of grit and sheen of slime over chrome that makes us feel a little on edge outside the door. The smiles and rages of passers-by, the sorts fields, the halloween parties, the quiet drinks and intimate encounters that give us all life and feeling are, well, all there. This is a space which blends unreality with the real, and makes it feel true.


Part of that is the characters, of course. In large part who they are, their shared history, quiet wounds and old loves, those are revealed through the course of the text. Which…makes them rather hard to talk about. So, we can talk a little about Zelda, who we meet first, and we can talk broadly about her supporting cast without spoiling anything. And I have to say, I do rather like Zelda. She’s a walking wound on the world, a scarred over trauma looking for an excuse to be done with everything, to wash her hand sof all of it. To atone for losses she thinks she caused, living with her own hubris, her own mistakes, and arguing against her past self whose notions of heroism and pride led her toward what she feels is a catastrophic error, an error from which other people bore the cost. Hardened, perhaps not, but calloused, yes - living an existence on the boundaries, on the space between things, Zelda is counting the cost of old choices. Trying to save the world one incident at a time, scouring the country to fight back a tide of things that almost no-one else knows about, and even fewer are able to convince themselves to care about. Zelda is worn, and tired, and the only thing she’s more done with than your shit is her own. Zelda is worn down, smart, exhausted, bitter, and so wrapped up in her own anti-legend that she maybe doesn’t have the best perspectiv eon things.


And that’s true of all of her friends, to be fair. The survivors of the team that failed to save everything years ago. They’re still, in some ways, living in that past. Trying to move on from it in their own ways, or reacting to it, defending themselves from a trauma deep and real and painful, looking back at their own youth and trying to understand it, make it make sense. These are people who have been hurt, paid a price for what they thought was something, and came to nothing, people who have seen the cost of believing the narrative - but who also know their friends, know them as people, love them, and don’t know how to make the world and their friendships stand together.There’s…a lot that will get unpacke dhere, about truth and the lies we tell ourselves. About age old pain, about hurt and how it shapes us as children, as adults.. About how we chose to be who we are, shaping the things that shape us in turn. And about the power of hope, and love, and friendship, and how even when those things may not be enough, they can be enough.


This is a story about how people who failed ot save the world are going to have to try again. About love and loss, about tragedy and understanding, and deciding who we are as people, who we want to be. About trying to change the world, in one way or another, and about deciding to do better, to be better. It’s a fierce, fiery gem of a book, one with edges so sharp you’ll cut yourself, and a light so bright it’ll show you things you’ve never seen before. It’s a damn fine story, and very much something you’ll want to read.

Last Exit is a dark, sprawling fantasy thriller that shouts defiance, triumphs the power of love and friendship, and will take its readers on a journey through worlds for the chance to resolve a terrible loss.

While at college, Zelda and her closer-than-family friends discovered a way to slip between what they call ‘alts’ – alternative versions of our own Earth, worlds similar to, but entirely apart from our own. They were young, they were looking for adventure, and they found it; until one terrible day that cost them one of their own and splintered the group. Zelda is the only one to reject returning to a more normal life, staying on the road, forever on the move, destroying the rot that slips between the cracks in reality and threatens our own world. But ten years later, the problem’s only growing worse, and when an encounter offers Zelda proof that the woman she loved may be trapped between alts, she knows the only chance to save the world is to get the band back together for one last mission.

This novel is a tapestry of characters, locations, and storylines, all thoughtfully made and woven together into one of the most satisfyingly expansive novels I’ve ever read. There’s a real urgency to the narrative – the world is under threat, our heroes are pursued by a truly terrifying foe – but there’s also moments of contemplation, the reader and the characters given a moment to breathe and gather themselves for the next leg of the journey. The story frequently dips into the backstory of this group of friends and their lives, both before it all went wrong ten years ago, and in the time since they went their separate ways. By the end of the novel, I knew them better than I know some people in the real world – to say it ups the stakes when an author can form that kind of bond between reader and characters is to undersell it.

Max Gladstone is already known for his limitless imagination and beautiful prose, not to mention his ability to find the magic in spaces usually deemed mundane. With Last Exit, he’s held nothing back, creating an edge and a depth of feeling that makes this novel raw and visceral, beautiful even at its bleakest moments and inspiring hope even as it breaks your heart. It’s a rollercoaster, a scream of defiance into an uncaring universe – and a truly excellent book.

I really enjoyed this novel! It was a totally different read from me, given how gritty and dark it is. The fantasy I read tends to be more along the lines of action-based--dark at times, sure, but more epic in scope. Last Exit, though, feels more dark because it's more grounded in our world, even though it still has those supernatural or fantastical elements in its story.. One thing i especially enjoyed about this novel was how viscerally you could feel the characters' emotions in each chapter; It's a story that feels larger than life in the sense that it deals with all of these grand themes--about darkness and redemption and life and death and good and evil--but it's also a very grounded story in that it's about these particular characters at a particular time in their lives and living in a particular kind of world. Gladstone is clearly a very character-focused writer, and that is something I always like to see in the novels that I read. Altogether, though Last Exit was a dark book, it definitely wasn't a grim or nihilistic one. It's definitely worth a read, and I'm looking forward to delving into Gladstone's backlist in the future!

I was first introduced to Max Gladstone's books when I was in seminary. The first year in seminary is typically a hard one. You do a lot of unpacking and deconstruction of things you've believed your entire life and sometimes the process of putting it back together isn't an easy or pretty one. It was also my first time living in a big city and I constantly felt that the world was crushing in on me. Sometime during that year I read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead and I can honestly say that book was a huge part in why I survived that year. And Max's books have continued to do that for me.

Especially Last Exit.

I remember hearing Max speak at an event once and discribe his books as 'theopunk.' My seminary friends (who I shared my copy of Three Parts Dead with) and I suggested that Hopepunk is maybe an even better descriptor. At the root of Gladstone's books is an overwhelming since of hope and that it's worth having hope in the end because sometimes that hope is rewarded.

Last Exit is no different and I would argue the most 'hopepunkish' book that Gladstone has ever written.

Gladstone doesn't pull any punches. The world he paints is a nasty world, our world. The characters of this book are all too well aware the world is ending around them whether it's because of global climate change, the growth of fascist systems, or just the general distrust and disregard that we so often have for our own neighbors. Gladstone aptly calls this a rot alongside the other Rot that serves as the antagonistic force in the Last Exit is what the main characters thought they could solve when they were younger and more idealistic. Those days are passed them, though, and after the loss of the friend that bound them together they've separated. Things are getting worse though and this brings the group back together for one last journey.

I could rave about the amazing things this book does for hours but a lot of it would be familiar to anyone who has ever read a Gladstone book before. He writes characters almost better than anyone else writing today and he respects his own characters in a way that is singular in my opinion. He goes from action scene to deeply introspective scene better than most authors and his prose is always graceful.

I think what sets this book apart from other Gladstone books is that it speaks true to the chaos of the world around us but also gives an important message of hope in these times. There is hope that the world can get better but we need to work for it and work to nurture it and work to bring it to actuality. In my opinion, that's an important message any time but especially for the present we find ourselves in now. That message sets this book apart from the author's other books and makes this not only a timely book but a necessary one.

It only feels fitting to end this review with the benediction that Gladstone shares on occasion on Twitter: Let us go and work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

What does the end of the world look like? Gladstone's novel ruminates on our collective idea of civilization in this dark, and at times difficult novel. Probably a lot of us have thought about what the end times might look like in the last few years and Gladstone gives us not one but many versions of how the world ends. While in college, Zelda and her friends find a way to travel to alternate worlds - and they are all terrible. Extraordinary adventures are hinted at...but we come across the group after they have failed to save the world and split apart, and right before they must reunite to try again but in a more desperate circumstance. This novel examines privilege, fear, assumptions, and urges us to rethink our perceptions and reexamine our bias'. A challenging novel for challenging times.

I received an early copy in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Macmllian- Tor/Forge for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel.

I started Last Exit having heard some hype but with no idea what to expect otherwise. I was hooked immediately by the electric prose. Gladstone blends commentary on modern American life with mind-bending science fiction adventure. The physics and math throughout reminded me of The City we Became by NK Jemisin.

From early on there is an undercurrent of magic to the writing and the world. It is delightfully queer and woke. I found myself hopelessly addicted to the story, a rarity these days. It pulled me in with an invisible energy like what drew the characters together for their journey.

The story builds to a fitting and satisfying conclusion. This is sure to be on my list of favorites at the end of the year.

Last Exit is such a bold take on the modern world through fantasy. Although there are plenty of out there speculative elements, it always comes back to this world and the humans of it. Every one of the main characters is easy to understand, love, and sometimes resent, and their narratives as individuals and as a group work perfectly. I do feel like the book felt a little long at points, with a few bits stretching out just a little, including action sequences, intellctual tangents, and even the occasional flashback (although elsewhere the flashbacks are the heart and highlight). Conversely, the end is just slightly too abrupt - I think a few of the ideas needed to unwind a bit - but I have no issues with the narrative choices of the finale. This is an immensely clever and stylish read, but most of all is an empathetic and endearing one.

This book felt like a trippy, genre-bending whirlwind adventure! Gritty sci-fi meets urban fantasy meets modern western with a little bit of horror and Mad Max post-apocalyptic open-road action thrown in for good measure, where there is magic and physics, a mysterious and chilling cowboy, and a race to save the world from the rot that is threatening to take control.

I enjoyed the overall pacing of the book, where there are three distinct speeds as the book progresses: quick action scenes where danger is right behind any given character, contemplative scenes that slow down the book and allow for reflection and for the reader to catch their breath, and flashbacks to tie each character’s past to the present. In this way, the story felt like an action-packed slow burn, which I know seems a bit like an oxymoron, but an enjoyable one!

Gladstone also has a way of writing with beautiful language, and it’s interesting to read a gritty and dark book that’s simultaneously gorgeous in its prose! Because the writing is so dense, I found that it was better in small chunks over time instead of marathon reading to devour it all at once.

While much of the book takes place in alternative worlds, we still are faced with relevant human topics like climate change, political discord, social equality, youthful idealism, and what it means to change the world. The book is bizarre and rich and otherworldly, and I enjoyed it quite a bit!

I tried several times to get into this book, and it just didn't work out for me. I am a big sci-fi fan, but for some reason I just couldn't get invested in the story or the characters. I think that perhaps others might enjoy Last Exit, but I'm sad to say, this just wasn't for me.

I really wanted to like this book. But the suicide ideation in the first chapter itself put me off immediately. It’s too much of a trigger for me to feel comfortable. I still continued reading but couldn’t get into the story anymore. But I have to say that whatever I did read, I found the writing to be very beautiful and I’m sure others who love urban fantasy can appreciate this one better than me.

This is beautifully written. As in, I literally took a picture of a paragraph to share with friends because it was just so beautiful. This book is not easy or fun, but it is *good*. So very, very good. It takes a moment to get into the rhythms of the narration jumping through time and perspective, but once you get that, you want to fly through. You'll want to devour this, but the writing is dense and lovely. It deserves to be savored in slow, thoughtful bites. Gladstone, as always, can set up a highly complicated magical system that is fully believable and understandable. In less deft hands, it would be easy to hate these characters, but Gladstone has you cheering for them, hoping for them. Read this, but take your time. It's worth it.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Macmllian- Tor/Forge for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel.

Imagine having access to travel to alternate worlds, to see places where instead of turning right or left one person went straight, making a new world on one decision good or bad. Five friends discover the power to crossover, a group of young people with long lives ahead, dreams, hopes and desires to be discovered, here there and everywhere, each with particular skills exploring these new worlds. And finding a rot that seems to infest everywhere, and one of this friends disappears into it.

Max Gladstone in Last Exit has created a science fiction, with a bit of fantasy and horror, about youth losing innocence, finding your place in the world, maybe trying another world to find a better place, finding love, growing old, and watching it all turn to rot. Zelda meets Sal short for Sally in college, and soon are inseparable. Along with three friends they find an ability to enter different alternative worlds the alts. Everything is grand and exciting until Sal disappears, thought dead in the rot they find that is destroying these alternative worlds, causing the group to separate and Zelda to fall into despair. Until Zelda finds Sal is still alive.

There is a lot going on in the book. A lot of Americana, big cars, the open road, the city is a cage, youth finding itself. And getting old and finding out that reality is not jus what you make it, but what a lot of others are content to make. The characters are interesting, Zelda might get a little maudlin especially in the beginning, but she, and the rest of the cast, especially June, Sal's younger cousin. June gives an especially good rant on the evils of Robert Moses and his "works" for the city of New York, one that I never expected to find in a science fiction novel, so that was great.

A good story with a lot of potential for growth. This was my book by Mr. Gladstone, who has won quite a few awards, and I will have to track down more. For fans of N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became, or any one who likes science fiction with a strong dose of the weird and the real.