The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Matt Dinniman)

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 6
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION:

Every floor of the dungeons has been designed to break not only the bodies but the wills and spirits of the surviving humans, and the harder Carl and Donut and the others resist, the more sadistic the "game" becomes. The eighth level is dedicated to reminding all of the crawlers just what was lost when the aliens took over. It's a "tribute" to the last days of free Earth, where the crawlers move through recorded, ghostly versions of the surface world nations in the days leading up to the end of everything... where people cannot be interacted with, but physical objects like cars can still be deadly. Also, the creators and AI have recreated many of the local monsters of folklore and legend for each locale, from Irish banshees to Pacific Northwest sasquatches to the myriad deadly demons of Japan. But this time, there's another game at play: the crawlers not only need to fight these new mobs, but take at least six powerful monsters for "totems" in a card game that will unfold in the second phase of the level, one that will determine who gets to proceed to the ninth floor and who dies here and now. With the way this crop of crawlers has already messed with the systems (and meddled in intragalactic politics and profit margins), the creators clearly have no intention of letting any crawler survive to reach the Faction Wars of the ninth level, meaning to make their deaths as painful and humiliating as they possibly can... but the "Princess Posse" won't go down without a fight, and may find some unexpected allies even as they unearth new enemies and complications.
This book contains the sixth installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW:

What else can I really say about this series? Dinniman delivers yet another astounding, sometimes horrific, sometimes hilarious outing for Carl, Donut, and the rest of the crew. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride maintains the momentum of the previous installments admirably, building on prior developments in the greater arcs and creating new complications that will no doubt come back to haunt the characters in future installments, even as the cast yet again thins by a few notable names. Carl and Donut are drawn deeper into the drama between the "gods" of the dungeon world and the greater galactic political nightmare, even as the already-unstable AI slips a few more notches away from sanity and out of the game runners' control. They're both getting better at juggling the demands of life in the dungeon with the need to play the larger game, especially now that they've secured an official spot in the Faction Wars on the next floor, but that only puts them in more danger, creating more ways for enemies to strike at them. It can be a bit sprawling and overwhelming, but generally one can ride it out and trust Dinniman to know what he's doing, which so far he seems to. More is also coming out about the origins of the "Primal" AI systems that are used to create the reality-altering bubbles in which the dungeon games occur, and how even the people running the show are unaware just how massively they've blundered in mishandling tech they still do not truly understand.
For the in-book arc of the eighth floor, the dungeons find new ways to twist the knife in the guts of the surviving crawlers, forcing them to witness just what it was that they lost when the aliens arrived and the dungeons appeared. Each have been placed deliberately to endure encounters with ghosts of their past, both as memory phantoms playing out the recording of the final free days of the species and as resurrected and twisted versions of family and loved ones that they're forced to confront... but first the crawlers have to fight their way through hordes birthed from the collective imaginations and fears of humanity in the form of legends and monsters and other iconic ideas made flesh (including an "Uzi Jesus," the assault rifle-bearing, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, enemy-crushing, and hate-spewing embodiment of a church gone so far off the rails it wouldn't even recognize its purported founder). These bring their own complications and side-quests, as well as unexpected opportunities if a crawler is clever enough about the (literal) cards dealt them. As for the card game, I don't play the sort of games that inspired this, but I could follow the gist of the action if I just let things play out; I'm sure I'd have gotten much more out of it if I were more familiar with the intricacies of combat card games.
As I've come to expect from the series, the action just keeps building to a truly explosive finale, which entails some sacrifices but also offers a faint glimmer of hope going ahead, that maybe Carl and company can indeed survive what's ahead... at least for one more floor. The epilogue, of course, promises more wrenches in the works, as does the sixth installment of the bonus story.
It goes without saying that the seventh book is on deck, to be started as soon as I can clear a little breathing space in a summer that's already overloaded even though it just technically started.

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