So, if you don’t know yet… you should probably read my summary in a previous review.

Carl, Donut, Mongo, Katia and Mordecai are now on the sixth floor which is called The Hunting Grounds.  This is when just anyone out there in the universe can purchase a place in the Dungeon and engage in sanctioned murder of crawlers.  The problem for them is that they’ve never met anyone like Carl before.  Carl plans ahead like nobody else.  So at the end of the last floor, he made sure to throw in a monkeywrench that made it impossible for the Hunters to buy the gear they need.  He also made off with something that no one in the Dungeon ever expected him to get:  the Gate of the Feral Gods.  Carl has plans for that Gate when he hits the ninth floor.

The crawlers are in a jungle and they have to find towns to take over and control, survive the hunters, and find a stairwell…in seventeen days.  The hunters are all concentrated in one city and the crawlers have a headstart of thirty hours; but Carl has no intention of just waiting for the hunters to come to him.  He’s interested in how much damage he can do while they’re all just sitting around getting drunk.  Interestingly, Miriam Dom and Pony had the same idea and between them they managed to murder more than fifty hunters before they could even get in the game.  No one said they couldn’t do it; it’s just that no one anticipated it.  Unfortunately for Carl, one of the Hunters had the same idea and sent some vicious little monster weasels to get Carl; fortunately for Carl, he has friends who take care of him.

Carl and Donut have quite a bit more to do with both Miriam and Prepotente aka Pony on this floor.  It will take a very unexpected turn and change some of the dynamics amongst the crawlers.  Carl isn’t the only strong, smart and heroic crawler out there; he’s probably the most unpredictable one, though.  He is, however, now the number one crawler on the board; supplanting the murderous Lucia Mar and her dogs.  Which will make him the number one target for the hunters.

He was warned by a former crawler that many of the hunters return each season and the most rapacious is a Mantis named Vrah.  Vrah has used one of the God rules to hamstring Carl, who is now a Devotee of his god, Emberus.  He cannot kill anyone or any NPC that worships Emberus, leaving him quite vulnerable.

A lot of the story centers around Mongo who has encountered a group of like dinosaurs and the female leader is quite taken with him.  This was a great deal of fun as Donut tries to keep her Mongo pure and unsullied; Mongo has quite a different view.

We saw at the end of the last book that the Administrators had found Bea, Carl’s ex and Donut’s owner, who had not gone down into the Dungeon.  It isn’t clear to Carl just exactly what they have planned for Bea but the three of them have their first meeting during a TV show and Donut has a chance to express her repressed anger and sadness at Bea; although it isn’t the drama the showrunners were hoping for.  Carl is worried they still have a plan for Bea that may further upset Donut.  Both Carl and Donut are starting to exhibit high levels of stress that may cause a breaking point for one or both of them.

Oh, and Donut is somehow conspiring with one of the media liaisons and there may be a revolution involved.  Carl suspects but can’t talk with Donut about it since every word they say and even their chats can be spied upon by Borant.  He has no idea how she’s managing to keep her activities a secret from Borant.

Carl ends up involved in a quest with an NPC to kill the High Elves Queen; the Elves live in a big castle that has one of the stairwells.  It will also be the site of the Butcher’s Masquerade on the last day.  Many events will coincide with the Masquerade and Carl is making plans to do as much damage as possible, as usual.

The most formidable hunter is Vrah and she has a special desire to eviscerate Carl.  He killed her younger sister (her mother probably had ten thousand kids).  And it is a bit of a worry for Carl.  He ends up as a Special Guest at CrawlerCon.  Yes to all you readers who’ve been to a SF/Fantasy or Horror Con:  it’s exactly the same.  It’s a complete hoot.  He has to autograph pictures for kid fans.  But even here, Carl does the unpredictable thing that the Administrators and AI didn’t anticipate:  he enlists the help of his fans to brainstorm ideas on how best to kill Vrah and totally humiliates her mother in the process.  It was either a brilliant move or the stupidest idea ever; it could go either way for any Carl decision.

There is ever so much more that I haven’t even mentioned.  Carl is forming a more detailed picture in his head of just how the Dungeon is administered.  And he’s seeing signs that not everyone is onboard with the whole genocide thing; there may be a lot of opposition out there and he’s determined to use it, if he can.  He still intends to bring down the whole Dungeon, if he can.  And one of his steps on this floor is to declare publicly that he intends every single hunter to be killed before this floor collapses.  To that end, he enlists and recruits as many of the top crawlers, who are the ones invited to the Masquerade, as he can to coordinate efforts.  An added bonus is that the more hunters that are killed, the more families there are confronting Borant about their missing loved ones.

There’s always a side story about the NPCs which have become something of a cause for Carl.  He is angry and sad that most of them never understand how their lives are just entertainment fodder.  This story is no different; he ends up promising to save a whole bunch of them so they won’t die when the floor collapses.  His plan to do so has a lot to do with his long-term plan for the ninth floor.  If we see one floor per book, then I have to wade through two more monstrously huge novels to see his plan. 

Ninth floor is starting to look pretty awesome and yet more fraught than any.  Donut cannot exit that floor until every single member of particular family is dead (I can’t recall all the details, it was a couple floors ago); it was a sidebar story that involved a tiara that she no longer even has.  And the really fucked up part?  If another crawler ends up with that lost tiara, they will have the same requirement – which means only one of them can exit the floor.

So at the end there is a huge party.  The top fifty crawlers and the remaining 260 hunters will make nice with each other.  There are cutting edge safety protocols in place so that no killing will happen during the party.  Well, the administrators think their safety protocols are cutting edge; but Carl will inevitably find a way to fuck them up.  He has promised, you remember, that every single hunter will be dead before the floor collapses.  He has two quests to finish; one involves the daughter of the female dinosaur that Mongo is banging, and the other is helping the NPC kill the High Elf Queen.  Along the way, he has to manage to keep from being killed by the psychotic Mantis Vrah.  Oh, jeez…I almost forgot to mention Lucia Mar.  Lucia is also obviously psychotic and she may not understand that if she kills anyone during the party, not only will it seriously mess with Carl’s plans but that a whole lot of crawlers may end up dead or worse.  But keeping Lucia from killing anyone is its own issue; and what Carl and his friends discover about Lucia turns her whole story on its head.  What puzzles Carl is how the policies of the Dungeon even allowed Lucia to become a crawler at all.  She shouldn’t have been.  And I have a growing suspicion that her dogs are not what they seem.

I have to give the author straight-up kudos for the most convoluted plot ever.  I’m pretty sure he knows already just how the whole series will end.  He has to put the clues out there for us to make this all work.   I read the book as fast as I can, at a breakneck speed, which is about how fast it is for Carl and the other crawlers.  They don’t even have to sleep that much anymore.  And its hard to keep all the story threads clear in my head.  Most of the time I don’t even bother; I just roll with the story. And there was a probable sighting of Agatha’s walker…

The next installment of “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret” is getting a lot darker.  The last one was amusing; amorous hamsters, what’s not to love?  This one introduces a changeling NPC, Willow Joy, who escaped the 18^th floor.  Typically, this NPC faithfully performed her duties for uncounted seasons until she was thoughtlessly discarded.  She escaped into the 17^th floor.  She is different from other NPCs in that she knows exactly what she is, where she is (mostly anyway), and how disposable she is.  She doesn’t know what’s going on at the 17^th floor but she figures out who she needs to control for her own survival:  Gary the Gnoll.  Unfortunately, she’s not the only one who sees the value in Gary’s skill.  Gary keeps trying to recreate his love, a lady gnoll.  Unfortunately, the System won’t allow it and, instead, he keeps creating an extremely nasty and evil creature, a mimic.  And he’s done this dozens of times so there are dozens of this creature running around in the System and it doesn’t look like the AI recognizes the danger.  Willow Joy sees the danger but she’s not prepared for it.  And it’s obvious to this reader that neither the AI or the System is prepared either.  And one of the hamsters is still missing.  ~~  Catherine Book

P.S. I found a website that sells Dungeon Crawler merchandise: pagewings.com

P.P.S.  There’s a crowdfunding for a Dungeon Crawler Carl roleplaying game by Renegade Game Studios.  The crowdfunding will be concluded by the time this review is posted but you should keep an eye on Renegade Game Studios website.

For more books by Matt Dinniman, click here