This book, for me, was mostly vibes. Lots of excellent quality vibes, but don't ask me to tell you anything about the plot—I won't be able to. I mean, there were some cool dialogue scenes that had parts that still echo in my head. And there were some absolutely amazing, wondrously horrible lovecraftian snapshots of other realms. And there were lots of not-so-good feelings, written in an overwhelmingly engrossing way. But what actually happened, or what was the point of any of it? I'm not sure I know.

Max Gladstone's prose is hauntingly beautiful—I was able to appreciate it even listening to the novel as an audiobook (it's normally harder for me to process prose that way), and I actually want to re-read Last Exit as a regular ebook one day, just to enjoy the prose even more and maybe to make sense of something else. The way the narrative's constructed, though, was endlessly confusing. The time and space kept swapping around. One moment we would be firmly in Zelda's feelings-filled head, and then there would be a paragraph from an omniscient narrator out of the blue. Some parts dragged, a few whooshed past. There was a lot of focus on some details that were framed like they would be important to the narrative at some point, but they never were; at the same time the things that were (probably? maybe?) crucial were often glossed over.

I'm not really complaining about any of the above; this confusion actually added to the vibes. When I treated the novel as less a sequence of events and more of a randomized chaos of the MC's reactions to events from past and present, it was a beautiful experience, for the most part. But I came out of it feeling a little lost, and like I hardly knew any of the characters as people (though I sure know how they feel about some things?).

Once again, it's possible that part of it is coming from my relationship with the audiobook format. I think I've gotten better at processing audiobooks lately, but I still get distracted from them way more easily than when I'm reading the regular way, and I also often only have the time to listen to them in bed, when I'm already getting sleepy. So I think I'll almost definitely re-read this novel at some point and see if my impression differs.

If anything, I'll get another helping of the vibes. The vibes are top-notch.

Gladstone's prose is in a class by itself. Language flensed and rebuilt. The worldbuilding, the characters, the magic, all are phenomena in their own right, but nobody bites with words quite like that. Also he almost made me care about muscle cars, which has never been done before.