I’m back with Dungeon Crawler Carl and I have nothing all that new to report. Everything is still hilarious, still action-packed, Carl and Donut still rock. Okay, there are some news, mainly that this book offers even more cool ideas and quite a bit of heartbreak. The stakes are getting higher, the aliens weirder, the crawl ever more dangerous. I, however, am still as much in love with this series as ever.
SPOILERS FOR ALL PREVIOUS BOOKS BELOW!!!
THE BUTCHER’S MASQUERADE
by Matt Dinniman
Published: Dandy House, 2022
Ebook: 732 pages
Audiobook: 23 hours, 33 minutes
Narrated by: Jeff Hays
Series: Dungeon Crawler Carl #5
My rating: 8/10
Opening line: Time to Level Collapse: 17 Days. Time Until the Hunt Begins: 30 Hours.
Attention. Attention. The gates are down. The hunters are loose. Run, Run, Run.
A lush jungle teeming with danger. Savage dinosaurs seeking blood. A fallen princess intent on vengeance. A mysterious, end-of-floor celebration for the top crawlers, dubbed “The Butcher’s Masquerade.”
The sixth floor. The Hunting Grounds.
As the remaining crawlers battle for their lives, a new, terrible threat looms. Outside tourists are finally allowed to enter the game, and they are here and ready to hunt. Among them is Vrah, a famed and veteran hunter, intent on collecting the biggest trophy of her career.
But their prey is far from harmless, and this season they are fighting back.
Dungeon Crawler Carl and Princess Donut return in book five of the acclaimed litrpg series.
The deeper we go into the Dungeon and the further along I get into the series, the harder it becomes to review each individual book. If you’ve come along on the journey so far, you know the basics and you definitely don’t need me to tell you to read on. You’ll want to do that anyway. So what I want to focus on, instead, is how this book manages to do all the things the previous volumes did, but adds something new and interesting as well.
The sixth floor of the dungeon is where a new threat is introduced: hunters. People from the real world can join the dungeon and go crawler hunting. Is that fucked up? Hell yeah. Is it more fucked up than putting actual human beings in a real life dungeon crawler game and having them “kill, kill, kill”? Not really. At this point, it just seems like a logical extension of how this game and the universe works. That doesn’t make it any less terrifying. I kept thinking of the careers from the Hunger Games, people who’ve been training and working hard to be in perfect shape for killing some innocents. Now Carl and Donut are pretty decent at the game, they’ve constantly leveled up and they have a group of friends and supporters that will definitely help them overcome obstacles. But the hunters are something else…
It’s not only the hunters, however, who threaten our heroes on the sixth floor. The world is a jungle and in that jungle, we have dinosaurs and cute teddybear-like creatures. Oh, and elves. Plus, vegetation that can get decidedly unfriendly towards the living.
It never fails to amaze me how Matt Dinniman comes up with all of his ideas and then also manages to put them together in a kitchen sink kind of way that somehow always ends up making perfect sense. And then he adds that humor cherry on top that makes the entire series so fun, despite its really dark themes. I mean, Donut becoming mayor and Mongo finding love (or at least lust) were not things I had on my list of things to expect from DCC, even though, on second thought, I totally should have. 🙂
Dinniman also expertly picks up some open plot threads from earlier books and wraps some of them up, while juggling others for a later resolution. I very much enjoyed where Signet’s storyline led us and how Carl and Donut tackle the new quests that come their way. All the elements of the previous book that my brain marked as “may be important later” are also still in play and come in handy at times. First and foremost among them is the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, a guide so fucking useful I hope Carl gets to keep it until the end. Even though I suspect things will not end up being that easy…
The picking up of threads also includes some of Donut’s backstory and a confrontation with her former owner (and Carl’s ex) Miss Beatrice. This meeting didn’t go as I expected, but it made Donut feel like a much more believable, three-dimensional character, rather than comic relief. Of course she was never just comic relief, but her being a cat, I didn’t expect the same emotional range as a human. I do now.
As the cast of characters grows, so did my emotional investment. My heart still firmly belongs to Carl and Donut, but Katia has also turned into a big favorite. Even some less prominent side characters get a moment to shine, and – inevitably in a story such as this – will meet their untimely end. Samantha, the body-less sex doll head, has grown strangely dear to me and I adore the way Jeff Hays reads her. Prepotente and Miriam Dom were mentioned often, but take center stage on this floor, to both my delight and despair.
This was probably the first DCC book that really made me cry. It also feels like the deadliest, but probably because the crawlers who get killed are no longer just numbers, but real people that we know and care about. It’s a testament to Matt Dinniman’s skill and love for his own series how much it affected me.
While the book is funny as always and the “goddamnit, Donut”s keep coming at the expected pace, this was also the saddest book so far. Obviously because of the character deaths mentioned above, but I also felt the overall tone shifted slightly, leaning more towards despair. It’s no spoiler to say that Carl and Donut make it through this level, but the way there was harder and more painful than ever before.
The battles are fun, sometimes explosive, usually very clever, and the way Samantha takes her place in the party just made me giggle every time. But there’s also more blood and loss, and especially the final battle takes a toll that felt more like actual war than the Hunger Games. At this point, I’m no longer so sure that everybody I like will make it out of this alive…
The book ends with an absolute knife to the heart and I’m not sure I want to read on right away. The series is still awesome and I loved every single volume so far (and of course I’ll finish it), but that epilogue promised certain things to come that I would rather keep at a distance for now. Way to build up tension, Mr. Dinniman. You’re going to break my heart again, aren’t you?
MY RATING: 8/10 – Excellent
