Dungeon Crawler Carl has quickly risen to one of my favorite series of all time. It’s brutally fast paced, irreverent, and has a delightful blend of horror, humor, and melodrama that I adore. This review is for Book 7, which focuses on the much-awaited Faction Wars. Be warned, spoilers ahead for anything in books 1-6.
Honestly if you’ve reached Book 7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, you don’t need me to tell you whether or not you’ll like the series. If you’ve got no idea what this is, look at my review for book 1 linked above.
Carl has arrived at Faction Wars, ready to kill a few thousand offworlders, win a bunch of money for Donut’s fan club, and try to figure out how to keep both Katia and Donut alive.
I think it’s worth flagging here that this book feels different in a lot of ways to the earlier stories, and feels like a turning point in the series. It reminded me a bit of how Harry Potter shifted a lot in tone and style in book 4. This is the book where it feels like the game is breaking down enough that the more traditional storyline elements of boss monsters just aren’t threatening him like they used to, and Dinniman is pivoting even more into the space-opera elements of the story that had previously haunted the background, but are growing more and more important as the series progresses. Whether or not this is good, bad, or neutral remains to be seen. It depends on how well Dinnaman sticks the landing.
What Worked For Me
Carl’s continuing emotional roller-coaster has been a highlight for a few books, but it hits especially hard here. We get to meet some of the cookbook authors in the flesh, and Carl’s responses were heartwarming and joyful. In fact, getting to see so many different cookbook authors in action (both within the game, but also through a series of interludes from the lives of many cookbook authors from moments during or after their crawls) was probably the single best part of this book.
I also have appreciated the continual depth that the broader cast are getting. Li Na got a lot of time to shine in this book, and the AI’s growth really kicked up a notch in this book. While we get a lot less traditional fight scenes than in the previous books (only one moment that really felt like a chaotic clusterfuck we’d see 5-6 times in each earlier book) the character work in This Inevitable Ruin was impeccable.
What Didn’t Work for Me
Overall, I think this book is my least favorite in the series so far. As I’ve said, it’s a transitional book which tend to come with a host of problems. If this were a trilogy, This Inevitable Ruin would be book 2. As we lose some of the more traditional elements (we get almost no top crawler lists or recap episodes this entire book, and their presence was sorely missed) and shift the focus more onto big picture conflicts, things will be lost before other things can be gained. It is entirely likely that I’ll look back at this as a genius book that set up for a phenomenal ending. But right now it feels like it lost a lot of the joy that other books in the series had.
The other big issue I had was that the pacing of this whole book felt off. Part of this was a mismatch in expectations: I was expecting plenty of dramatic fights with the different faction wars leaders, which didn’t happen almost at all (kind of like a real war!) but I thought that this already incredibly long book could have used some breather scenes for characters to talk, interact, and roast Carl about his loot boxes. Never thought I’d say a book should be longer, but this one needed some more space. I also think the shift in style would benefit from not being posted onto Patreon chapter by chapter (I say this as a Patreon backer who is already reading rough draft chapters of book 8) and instead edited like a more traditional novel would be.
In Conclusion: My least favorite of the series so far. It missed a lot of joy of earlier books as it pivots the series in scope and focus.
- Characters – 5
- Worldbuilding – 4
- Craft – 3
- Themes – 2
- Enjoyment – 3
Marked for Plot 