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

Carl, Donut, Mongo, Katia and Mordecai are on the fourth floor…which is a train system.  This book almost broke me.  The entire floor is a train system; stops, stations, different types of cars, and railway yards.  Some stations are safe where they can find a safe house and do shopping.  Some stations are just overrun with monsters.  And they have ten days to find a stairwell.  You can just bet at least some of the stairwells are at a monster station.

Both Carl and Mordecai realize that until they can map out the train system, they’ll have no idea where they are or where they need to go.  Despite the fact that both Carl and Donut are on the top ten leaderboard, with a price on their heads, Carl insists on making personal contact with as many crawlers as he can.  And with each contact, he adds them to his Chat app.  With that contact, he can then share out and gather information.  Very slowly, and not without a lot of fatalities, he and Mordecai start putting together a picture of the fourth floor.

This story pulls out all the stops when it comes to creating lethal monsters; including some that get even more lethal when they are killed or when they group together. But that isn’t the worst that Carl and Donut have to deal with.  They have to deal with the loss of Mordecai, their Manager.  Mordecai had an altercation with someone who really triggered him.  His murderous response got him tagged as breaking a rule.  He ended up in a time-out for seven days.  What that means is that Carl is on his own, pretty much.  Instead of always calling Mordecai with every single question, he’ll have to figure things out by himself. But he also discovers that he no longer has to deal with Mordecai’s caution and makes choices that he knows Mordecai would find questionable.  One of which is to ‘friend’ every crawler he can and share all the information he discovers about the floor.  The other…well, the other is a real game changer for Carl.  He wins a prize where he can pick.  He sees a couple really good prizes that he knows Mordecai would want him to pick.  And just because they can, the gamemasters or the AI really fuck with his choices.  His father’s 1965 Harley is a choice as is his own Craftsman rolling tool chest.  The Harley brings up a lot of memories and it would definitely be pretty cool to ride with Donut.  The tool chest would be incredibly useful to build stuff but Carl suspects the tool chest is actually empty and there to fuck with him.  But there’s this book…it has the ‘A’ symbol for anarchy, and his current class is Compensated Anarchist.  And he thinks he sees a magical glint.  It changes everything…the book is actually an instruction manual aka memoir of twenty-four previous crawlers and all they learned about the dungeon; information that Carl is sure that Borant wouldn't want him to know.  The book even informs him that he has to keep it completely secret, even from his teammates.  All of the previous twenty-four crawlers had a single objective: tear down the dungeon.  Carl is onboard with that.

The author did promise that the series would get darker as it goes on; he meant it. There’s some ugly stuff happening and Carl is more than dismayed at the loss of every human crawler.  But some humans are still bad people as he discovers despite his unfailing tendency to believe the best of people.  As the train system starts to collapse due to a bug in the system, Carl begins to believe that in addition to getting his team to a stairwell in time, he also needs to save as many people as he can.  His efforts border on the heroic and insane.  And every failure and loss crush him.

And Donut’s unfailing good nature and ability to look at the bright side take a serious hit.  She has to deal with the aftermath of an unintended action; which might change her personality.  Carl worries about that along with the whole kill-the-monsters-and-survive requirement.

We also get a little more close with other crawlers including a couple who are in the Top Ten leaderboard; one of which was once a demented old woman in a wheelchair until she escaped into the Dungeon.  She’s pretty hilarious.

We also get a little personal information about some of the media personalities, the Borant corporation and, most importantly, some of the NPCs.  The NPCs are treated just as horribly as the crawlers; the only difference is that most of them don’t know it because their memories are altered.  And that theme is explored in the latest installment of “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret,” the serialized short story at the back of the book.

I continue to devour these books; they are probably the fastest-paced stories I’ve ever read. The book is chock-full of action and destruction so the small moments when we hear Carl’s thoughts or see his interaction with the NPCs are the gems I wait for.  The whole premise is based on gaming and while my experience with gaming has been nominal, I get most but not all the references, that doesn’t diminish the impact of the story.  ~~  Catherine Book

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

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