So Last Exit is not in any way related to the Craft novels. It is instead a real-world fantasy that reminds me of Jo Walton and N.K. Jemisin.

The Jo Walton comparison is straightforward: She wrote a story, “Relentlessly Mundane,” about a group of kids who went through a portal to save a fantasy world, losing one of their number along the way, and who now are regular ol’ mundane adults talking about their fantasy-novel youth. Meanwhile, Gladstone’s novel has a group of kids who went through portals to fantasy worlds, losing one of their number along the way, and who are now regular ol’ mundane adults (sort of) getting the gang back together again.

But where that conceit is the entirety of Walton’s (very) short story, here it’s just the setup for what they’re gonna do now. And what they’re gonna do is take a road trip across a mythic America.

And this is where the Jemisin comparison comes in. As Jemisin does in her Cities books, Gladstone is writing a novel about the breakdown of society and trying to fix that (though his feels substantially less social-media-poisoned). And just as Jemisin’s NYC is a sort of living organism, there’s an increasing feeling that the America they’re driving through in Gladstone’s novel is similarly almost alive.

So as much as I’m comparing this to those two works — and the parallels really are striking at times — this is of course very much its own thing. Gladstone is always an excellent writer, and that remains true here. If it’s less endlessly inventive than his Craft books, it’s probably more accessible in equal measure. Still, I think this ultimately reads as a kind of minor side project that’s not quite up to the level of the Craft books. (But then, I also thought that about This Is How You Lose the Time War, which everyone absolutely loved, so what do I know.)