The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
WARNING: There are spoilers in this review. They are marked. If you want a spoiler-free review, ignore the words in italics. Or read the review on Goodreads here.
There is SO MUCH going on here. Too much. And, frankly, I feel like that detracted from what could have been the best book of the series so far.
So Level 8 of the dungeon drops the crawlers (about 38,000 of them) onto the surface of earth … on Dec. 10th — about three weeks before the collapse. But it’s not time travel. What they see are holograms, basically. Well, at least the living things are. Anything that isn’t biological is “real.” Also, there are mobs (bad guys) that are really there to fight against.
The crawlers have to beat the mobs and “flag them” to turn them into Yu-Gi-Oh cards, basically. And then they use their decks of cards to beat other bad guys and potentially fight one another.
As is often the case, there are side quests that add to the difficulty and add to the story. Side quests in this book include SPOILER [a trip to a corrupted temple, where they have to chose one of seven gods to unleash. Carl makes the choice to unleash one specific god because he’s told doing so will help save Katia — a fellow crawler — and potentially avoid a fight to the death between Katia and Donut on the next level.] END SPOILER
Then there’s another quest where SPOILER [Carl and Katia (with help from others) have to kill Astrid, the assistant manager of the Desperado Club. Again, this is to prevent the fight between Katia and and Donut that is required because they have both worn the Crown of the Sepsis Whore.] END SPOILER
There’s more quest and side quests. And, personally, I think a lot of it is unnecessary. At times the book kind of drags. Other times, I just kind of got lost. By the end, I had trouble remembering what all was in THIS book. I had to check Dungeon Crawler Carl’s Fandom page for book 6 in order to write this review because SO MUCH happened.
That said, there is some amazing character development here with Carl, especially. But also with Katia. There’s some hilarious moments and more than a couple emotional gut punches.
I had seen someone say on Threads (find me there) that Matt Dinniman overuses the word “gore.” And I hadn’t noticed it before. Now I can’t not notice. It’s not overly problematic. Just a thing I noticed.
Dinniman’s writing is still top-notch. Although I am starting to wonder if he just keeps trying to out-do himself and that’s why the books get longer. His epilogues are legendary. And this one is kind of mind blowing. It made me want to go to the seventh book immediately, but alas, I have to read something about sentient appliances for my semimonthly book podcast with my friends Craig and Howie. We’ll also be doing an episode soon on the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book. (click here for my review of that book.)
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