LAST EXIT review - a visceral, electric reflection of our world
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.
When Zelda and her friends first met, in college, they believed they had all the answers. They had figured out a big secret about how the world worked and they thought that meant they could change things.
They failed. One of their own fell, to darkness and rot.
Ten years later, they've drifted apart, building lives for themselves, families, fortunes. All but Zelda. She's still wandering the backroads of the nation. She's still fighting monsters. She knows: the past isn't over. It's not even past.
The road's still there. The rot's still waiting. They can't hide from it any more. Because, at long last, their friend is coming home. And hell is coming with her.
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.
Thank you to the publishers for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. For readers' reference, I will be purchasing a copy when it becomes available in my country.