Thoughts on "Last Exit" by Max Gladstone

For once, I'm reviewing something I did not get an ARC of, but Last Exit has spent enough time in my head over the past month that I felt compelled to make a written record of my thoughts. This post will contain vague discussions of other books as well as Last Exit, but no explicit spoilers for anything beyond what you might get from a back cover.

My immediate thoughts on the book were almost entirely about vibes--it's a dark, heavy, atmospheric book, the color of the sky before a storm, with that flavor of looming rain. It lives almost entirely in the same space as the beginning of The Tyrant Baru Cormorant: a horrible mix of doubt about all the right things and certainty about all the wrong ones, a space beyond hope because everything you've tried has gone wrong. The prose reflects this painful environment, often literally making feelings flesh with intense physical detail, descriptions of bones and muscle and skin and wounds. Last Exit's characters all bear scars, and the reader is made to feel those scars in a visceral and literal sense. Some of this language was present in Gladstone's previous solo novel, Empress of Forever, especially in a middle section where the protagonist Viv confronts the costs of standing up to the Powers that Be in a world beyond the one she grew up in. Here he doubles down, finds a clear voice, and delivers a book full of fear and want and things that might be hope but might be something much worse, or something much better. Seth Dickinson once said that the Baru Cormorant books are about what happens after we have made hard choices, and whether there is any humanity left in those who have knowingly made a monstrous choice and constantly wonder whether it was worth it. Last Exit is similarly about what it's like to grow up and move beyond the well-trod path from prodigy to hero, but it asks a parallel question: what happens after we are told is the right thing, know is the right thing, may even objectively be the right thing, and find that the world we are left with is not, in fact, a better world. Zelda is convinced that she has done what she is supposed to do and borne unimaginable burdens to keep the world safe from rot--her whole life and self-image are built around that idea--and yet instead of getting to live in a bold new world, she has to keep fighting, each time a little more depleted and a little more alone. On a personal level, it's a feeling I struggled with throughout undergrad and ultimately came to terms with by realizing that I was mainly carrying my own burdens, not the world's, and even those would fade as I grew into a different person over time. Neither of those are true for Zelda and her friends. They literally hold the fate of the world in their hands, and they've already grown up, with no next stage of life still to come. How Gladstone resolves their tension and allows them to lay down some burdens (albeit in order to pick up different ones) is at the core of the book's shocking and powerful ending.

[On the subject of college, I wonder just how different my undergrad was, how different it is from the real things lived by the people around me, and from the real things lived by Gladstone at a similar institution. His college life scenes have just enough of the familiar to be drawn into plausibility, and yet entirely different from my own experience despite taking place in a world that seems like it could be mine. This thought isn't really connected to anything, but I thought it was worth noting.]