Last Exit & Gone World

Escaping It All

This year, give your mom what she really wants: a visit to an alternate reality.

Two of our favorite books so far in 2025 involve familiar worlds twisted by chance and malign intent into places even more troubling than our own.

“Gone World,” by Tom Sweterlitsch, follows a detective searching broken futures for the means to avert an apocalypse so uniquely disquieting we can’t stop thinking about it.

Most of the novel takes place in the back woods of Appalachia. The forest of “Gone” is the kind of place Coil loves to ramble in, a place where you can feel sad and hopeful at the same time, and a where one can brush against worlds filled with both might-have-beens and might-yet-bes.

Lana Harper, who knows a thing or two about magic circles in gothic revival dorms, pointed us toward “Last Exit” by Max Gladstone. This might have been because Augur spent the years after he left those circles driving a Challenger through parts of America that were beginning a slide into shadow.

“Exit’s” hauntingly beautiful language circumscribes a group of students who discover magical portals, and realize that there is something dangerous and hungry waiting at the thresholds.

It’s hard to pick just one favorite quote from “Exit,” but this one is certainly in the running: “school was its own place . . . a special bubble full of weirdos . . . surrounded by magic circles and wards, unreal, and untouchable as fairy land. You could be someone there you hadn’t been before. You could expand to fill the space you’d cleared when you set your old self on fire. You could buckle a mask to your face and melt your face to fill the mask.”

Fair warning: both of these are difficult reads in 2025. It’s ok if your mom might prefer one of the many books we stock about smutty witches, dragons, and vampires.