#last exit

ULTRA rare find:

Tribe Tapes just added the "Belial" tape on their store

I've Got A Thing About You Baby 🎵 by Hubert Buck Jr., the Brooklyn Buck

This isn’t a love song. It’s a condition.

Tony Joe White sings like someone who knows exactly where the exits are — and keeps missing them on purpose.

A jukebox hum from a bar where the light never changes. A hunger that rents space in your chest and refuses to move out.

Brooklyn heat. No mercy. Last exit energy.

You don’t listen to this song to feel better. You listen to remember why feeling nothing was worse.

—

For the full Brooklyn Buck piece, take the last exit here: kuschelbock.com

Last Exit - Last Exit

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.