The Butcher's Masquerade
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 5
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: Since the start of the dungeons, Carl and the other crawlers have not only been prey for various "mobs" and NPCs, but subject to the whims of the game sponsors and other outside influences. But before, those outsiders could not directly interfere or enter the dungeons (save as embodied in other forms).
On the sixth floor, everything changes.
The Hunting Grounds see the crawlers subject not just to increasingly-deadly monsters and quests, but to hunters from the greater galaxy, come to collect bounties or simply trophies and bragging rights, as well as valuable loot for the upcoming ninth floor faction wars. It all culminates in the Butcher's Masquerade, a grand party - complete with pet show and talent competition - to close out the level... and, not incidentally, pick off the top crawlers to shake things up for future floors. Carl and Donut already have made enemies among the political elite, even as they've gained countless followers and fans. This puts a target on their heads, and the hunters are eager to take a shot.
But Carl, Donut, and their other allies are not the same people they were when they wandered down that first stairwell from the devastated surface of Earth. If the hunters think the crawlers are going to die easily, then they haven't been paying attention.
This book contains the third installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.
REVIEW: Many series either plateau or drop off by the fifth book. Once again, Dinniman astounds. Carl, Donut, and the others are not at all the same people they were at the start of the series, not always in good ways. Carl remains determined to resist all efforts to break him, but he and his morals have been distinctly bent by the needs of survival, even as his rage at the dungeon masters grows ever greater. He's taking bigger risks, and they sometimes blow up in his face, or the faces of the people he talked into trusting him. In the previous floor, he and Donut stopped being mere victims of the dungeon and started fighting back (though, of course, they're still stuck playing the "game" even as they plot acts of sabotage and rebellion). Here, with the faces of actual enemies before him in a setting where he has power - unlike the moments before when they've been transported to talk shows and other settings for grotesque interviews or game shows - he finally has a chance to unleash some of the rage that's been building within him from the start... but the game masters, of course, have ways of retaliating.
Donut, too, is not the cat she once was, and anyone who dismisses her soon learns that, long before they were bred for cat shows and companionship, cats were natural hunters. But her mind is no longer that of a pure animal, and she's feeling the stress, shock, and trauma every bit as much as Carl, even as she struggles to articulate it. Her increasingly human intelligence is also shown in how she remembers her life before the dungeons, which comes to the forefront when they encounter a face from their past. The dungeon throws an extra low blow at her when it brings in her old beau Gravy Boat, a.k.a. "Ferdinand," the neighbor's orange tom, now enhanced, brainwashed and turned into an NPC familiar of the floor's ultimate boss.
Carl and Donut know full well the twisted truth behind NPCs, how even those with familiar faces are no longer, and never will be again, the people they once were, but that doesn't make it easier to see one's family members, lovers, or even fallen crawlers "return"... which is, of course, quite intentional. The games have always had many layers - entertainment, blood sport, political commentary, and more - but first and foremost they are designed to inflict as much physical and psychological damage on the involuntary "crawlers" before their deaths as possible. It's thrown into surreal perspective when Carl is forcibly recruited to appear (holographically) at CrawlCon, a convention for fans of the dungeon crawler season. While Donut revels in her fan base, Carl cannot help feeling repulsed by the packed rooms full of people who are, in their own ways, cheering for the torture and death of everyone on his planet, despite all the cosplay and fan art professing their affection... and, of course, it's one more trap set up by the creators, another way to both psychologically mess with him and create more enemies and complications that will haunt him and his allies further into the dungeon, especially concerning the mantids.
The floor itself, the Hunting Grounds, changes up the formula again. The addition of the hunters adds a fresh wrinkle on top of the new monsters and quests and the backstories. Carl also has to reckon with the bargain he made with the elite Signet and the production company behind her show (that she is blissfully unaware of, being an NPC)... but the show is not the safety net he'd hoped, and may be a greater danger than an asset. There's also the goddess-possessed decapitated sex doll head from the previous floor, Samantha, who is becoming more of a character, if one driven by her own agenda and with unreliable motives. And the other crawlers have their own stories and fates, particularly the enhanced goat Prepotente and his former shepherd Miriam Dom. Donut and the goat have a particular bond, being the only enhanced animal crawlers, but Prepotente gets a particularly unpleasant shock that changes him in ways nobody anticipated, and which Donut can't help him with. Needless to say, the crawler cast thins significantly even before the Butcher's Masquerade finale, which provides a truly gory and spectacular ending to a brutal level, complete with a dinosaur dance line.
Meanwhile, the fifth chapter of the bonus story introduces another new character and angle on the ongoing arc of the NPCs building their revenge dungeon on the eighteenth floor, not all of whom believe in the promise of paradise beyond the games. But even here, the AI and game masters revel in cruelty and torment, yanking hope away even when that hope was barely a glimmer in the darkness.
I kicked this back up to a full five stars because of the plot twists and developments that ramped up the stakes even higher than before, and some truly heartbreaking moments and lines amid some bright spots and hilarity. There is still a bit of name sprawl and political tangle to navigate, but nothing I couldn't read around or past and pick up the gist. I might take a short break to read a novella before the sixth installment, which is a whopper of a book (north of 800 pages), but I'm looking forward to where things go from here.
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