Review.

Last Exit

Max Gladstone

Pub date: 8 March 2022
Publisher: Tor Trade
Reviewed NetGalley

I enjoyed Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, was a bit more ambivalent with Empress of Forever and approached Last Exit with trepidation and more than a little procrastination. And given that, it took a few chapters for me to want to get into it. But pretty soon it started to become a page turner and I found myself racing to (or at least attempting to) the end.

I’ve seen a lot of early reviewers attaching the label horror to Last Exit. Back in the 70s, the threat of nuclear destruction and the after effects of the Vietnam war that brought out a certain despair in the psyche. Movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now contained very little redemption and a whole lot of the horror. Last Exit is, my perspective, more akin to the world-weariness and despair of those 70s films than as a member of the horror genre.

That said, there are plenty of “demons” and “monsters” populating Max Gladstone’s latest book. His last book, Empress of Forever took science fiction into a pretty imaginative and metaphysical realm and Last Exit takes it a bit farther. Set in a pretty contemporaneous world, Gladstone presents the world through a lens of “rot” and decay—completely recognizable yet ultimately faded and worn; as if the world most of us see has just a rapidly thinning veneer and underneath it lies nothing but inevitable ruin. As the characters traverse the “alts” (alternative realities) they realize that things were bad, and now they are getting worse. But is it really their job to do something about it?

Last Exit is a story of the meaning of reality: the reality of friendship, of love, of the world we live in and the world we wish it could be. Gladstone pulls in as many cultural touchstones as he can in order to create/build/weave a connection, all the while slowly dissecting it, leaving the reader in a precarious state. As a result this wasn’t a book I managed to plow through at my usual rate. Max Gladstone has woven an undeniable tapestry, but whether the warp and weft suits you is going to be a matter of taste. But it’s worth experiencing.

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but I walked away thinking, “Huh…well, that was worth it.”