Here's the thing: if you spend a lot of time trying to find spoilers for a book (an audiobook in my case) so you won't feel guilty about not wanting to finish, it's a bad book.

I've read Gladstone before; the "Craft Sequence" is great and I love This is How You Lose the Time War, co-authored with Amal El-Mohtar.
The man can do prose like poetry and has demonstrated that he can write female characters quite well.

The problem with Last Exit is it makes me wonder if Gladstone fired his editor. It should've been nowhere near as long, the characters' personalities were not consistent, the inner dialog, introspection, and flashbacks kept tripping up the story, and the symbolism was like taking bricks to the dome in rapid succession.

The action sequences are amazing, but everything in between is so tedious all the horror and adrenalin are overshadowed. Every review from other authors are all glowing, which makes me think there's a conspiracy to coddle Gladstone or not one of them actually read it.

I like Gladstone, but this book has seriously pissed me off because he refused to kill any of his darlings and, if he had an editor, they were too mealy mouthed to confront him with a red pen.

Because of the similarities of themes and eldritch monsters, Last Exit has retroactively made me dislike NK Jemisin's The Cities We Became. It's not fair and completely my problem, because Jemisin might be as heavy handed with metaphor as Gladstone, she wasn't trying to be subtle and her work has the refinement only a good editor (or a team of editors) can enable. I just need time.

After Last Exit and having also read Empress of Forever, I can only surmise that Gladstone should not write anything longer than 300 pages. 

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. 

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! 

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor for the advanced readers copy!

 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.