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. 

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!