#Last Exit

[st-just]

In some moments, you could not deny the grinding force of history at work. Most days, you convinced yourself that you were a single clearly outlined person with wants and goals and needs, like a character in a comic panel with a flat color background, but from time to time your eyes opened and you realized your hands were not your own but wielded by a great groaning lurching process. You were a clockwork monkey atop a music box. If you could ask the monkey, no doubt it would believe that it wanted to play the cymbals. The winding key had nothing to do with it.

-Zelda, Last Exit by Max Gladstone

[torpublishinggroup]

the background of this picture is actually a deceptively mobile bench that swings side to side and concerningly far back. in that way, it's kind of like Last Exit by max gladstone, a book that will yank your heart in unexpected directions. read this book to mourn, sigh, smile, and shiver

[postpunkindustrial]

Last Exit - Last Exit

R.I.P. Peter Brotzmann

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 3 - Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Okay, book review number 3! This was a denser read than the last few books I’ve gone through – I think it literally had more words per page than standard? Or maybe just a heavier writing style.

Now to be clear this isn’t any sort of complaint – I absolutely adored this book (So, thanks a million to @booksandchainmail and @circletofcircles for pointing me towards it!). Feels like I was leaving a bookmark every few pages because there was a passage that really jumped out at me I wanted to save. I had to just start tearing up whatever receipts I had handy every bookmarks at a certain point. Between this and This Is How You Lose The Time War, I absolutely need to hunt down some more of Gladstone’s stuff (I say, as if I don’t already have Empress of Forever out form the library and sitting on my dresser).

So, the story doesn’t make any direct reference to Lovecraft – and it is otherwise not shy at all about making direct references. There are like a half-dozen places where I could just tell what book/article/discourse Gladstone had on his mind as he wrote it, even leaving aside the e.g. place literally named Elsinore – but it honestly did a better job of being an anti-cosmic horror story than a lot of the stuff that says on its face it’s About Deconstructing Lovecraft does, at least imo?

The alien is terrible, and terrifying. It’s vaster than you can imagine, and it will destroy everything about the life you know. It whispers to the desperate and forgotten, speaks and promises to those who’d cast aside the world for something, anything, else. Fighting it is miserable, and bloody, and leaves you ruined in body and soul. But saving the world requires sacrifice, requires hard lines and desperate measures.

But, well, have you taken a look at the world recently? How sure are you it’s better than what lies beyond it? How much killing are you willing to do, off that surety?

And the book is excellent is getting that sense of desperation, of sunk costs and impending doom and making it feel like the only real choices are finding a bit of happiness for you and yours and shutting out the bigger picture, or making yourself a sin eater shoring up a rotting foundation. Also just generally, at giving a sense of poverty and desperation and impending collapse.

I’d say the resolution and epilogue feel a little saccharine, but that really very much the point – cast aside the gods we’ve made to rule over us, and the world really will be as good and kind as you’ve never dared to dream it might be. It’s a very anarchist story, that way.

The villain’s really fascinating, honestly. Like, in a certain very pat sense, it’s the embodiment of settler colonialism – a cowboy in a white hat who is watching you through every NSA back door in every phone camera – but it’s a bit more fundamental than that. (Also, weirdly not that racist or homophobic, given that)

I mean in one sense, like, the Cowboy’s whole thesis is that the world is basically awful, and anything good for anyone comes only at a cost to someone else, and that if you want a comfortable life for you and yours, you better have some men with guns willing to keep the people your comfort is taken from from tearing it back with interest. All of his associations are with civilization – roads, cities, cameras, guns, hierarchy writ large – are you get the sense that all the specific referents are about Manifest Destiny, the core is very, well, we’ve all read Against the Grain, right? The passages about how the first city walls were probably built to keep people in as much as out seem relevant, especially.

Or – there was a Tides of History episode a few weeks back about the Assyrian Empire, and how according to royal theology Ashur the god WAS Ashur the City, and the spread of the empire was the ordering of the world according to Ashur’s laws was in a sense the spread of Ashur himself. That feels like a comparison the book would have drawn, if the subject had come up.

But I’m rambling and only barely coherently, so will stop myself there – book’s not perfect, by any means, have some nitpicks with the plot, the direct references to contemporary politics get a bit didactic feeling and tired when you’re getting them with the same perspective from four/five POVs, the finale kind of descends into melodrama – but really lovely book, would recommend.

(also – it’s not really relevant to anything, but between this and Ninth House what the fuck is up with Yale? )

[voskhozhdeniye]

Last Exit - I Must Confess I’m A Cannibal

[booksandchainmail]

ur periodic Last Exit posting is making me want to read it omg. i already read max gladstone’s substack for slightly sideways takes on writing so it’s not that much of a leap but now i’m considering picking up the series 👀

I'm glad! I really like basically every book Max Gladstone has written, but I didn't know he has a substack, I'll have to check that out.

RE: Last Exit, it's actually a standalone! (Though a hefty one). His longer series is the Craft books, which are secondary-world fantasy about magic lawyers, while Last Exit is an American road trip novel with dimensions hopping and cosmic horror.

Either one is well worth reading IMO, the Craft books are a little rougher around the edges to begin with, while Last Exit leans more into luxuriant prose

[brokenhandsmedia]

Some of these books were quite good; some were hard to get through.  All, I feel, were worth reading.

[nervoussystemmusicreverence]

Last Exit - Discharge

Music

Artist

Last Exit

Composer

Peter Brötzmann Ronald Shannon Jackson Bill Laswell Sonny Sharrock

Produced

Last Exit

Credit

Peter Brötzmann – tenor saxophone Ronald Shannon Jackson – drums, voice Bill Laswell – Fender 6-string bass Sonny Sharrock – guitar

Released

1986

Streaming

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Last Exit

Detonator

from the lp Iron Path

[st-just]

She'd not understood this about magic, back when she started to look for some: magic was a slow form of suicide. You pushed on that gap between the way the world was and the way the world could be until, if you were strong and smart and pure and very lucky and very dumb, one day the gap grew teeth and opened its mouth and ate you.

-Zelda, Last Exit by Max Gladstone

[torpublishinggroup]

would ya look at the time? it's book o' clock

[postpunkindustrial]

Last Exit - Last Exit

R.I.P. Peter Brotzmann

[threesorrows]

This has been mulling over in my brain for like 4 months now since I read Last Exit and I finally realized why, outside the narrative, Ish died.

Like, the basics of the situation are pretty simple since he was the one of the group that was vaguely constant corporate oversight. His philosophy was most similar to the cowboy’s than anyone else in the group so it was him that would be taken over. But that didn’t really explain why he had to die for it.

Sarah, Ramon, and Ish all had things to go back to, and while the situations differed the motivation to be able to go back didn’t really. He wasn’t primed in that way to be the one who doesn’t make it out.

The reason why it stumped me for so long, was the question of why was it only Ish? Why was Ish the only one to die? What made him unique? And the answer was, he wasn’t the only one.

Zelda doesn’t die conventionally, but she becomes something other than human and while the ending hints at her reappearance with Sal, she is not physically present in the way Sarah and Ramon are.

Zelda and Ish ‘die’ because they both refused to let go of the road. Zelda never left it, and even once Ish stepped off he created a company to stop the spread of what they saw on the road. Ramon and Sarah stopped, they made their lives away from the road. Zelda and Ish didn’t, and they were consumed by it.

[literary-illuminati]

This is very #barucore, I've decided.

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Review: Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Author: Max GladstonePublisher: Tor BooksReleased: March 8, 2022Received: NetGalley Last Exit is the latest novel to come from the mind of Max Gladstone, a science fiction and fantasy author I’ve been reading for years. Naturally, that meant I had to scoop it up! Though, if I’m being honest, that cover would have drawn me in regardless. A decade ago, Zelda and her group of friends learned that…