A Parade of Horribles
Matt Dinniman
The pen-penultimate novel
A Parade of Horribles is novel 8 in Matt Dinniman‘s Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It is also, I believe, the third-to-last novel, as indicated by this sentence in an Author’s note entitled “Here we are yet again.”
I’m already hard at work for Dungeon Crawler Carl’s penultimate book, and I don’t want it to end.
Thus we can be reassured that Dinniman has a plan to end this thing. Like him, I don’t particularly want it to end, but after seeing George R.R. Martin die on the job, unable to finish A Song of Ice and Fire, I consider that finishing is preferable to the alternative.
Like all of them, this installment is an impossible-to-summarize firehose of apparent chaos masking an orderly progression toward a carefully planned conclusion. Well, of course I won’t KNOW that until I see this hypothesized “carefully planned conclusion,” but at this point Dinniman has earned my confidence.
In this one we get through two floors of the dungeon, 10 and 11. We have reached the point where the mad AI running the game is totally in control and has gone full nihilist. It wants to die, but first its job is to eliminate (that means “kill” in most but not quite all cases) the crawlers. Once the crawlers are gone the Ascendancy Game begins. In past dungeons the Ascendancy Game has been a kind of boring game show played by the wealthy and powerful cosplaying as Gods. Carl has other ideas, of course.
Floor ten is designed to kill off a whole lot of crawlers. We begin it with 5501 of them. It’s a series of seven road races, and is so arranged that one can survive only by eliminating (see above vocabulary note) almost all the competing crawlers. I don’t think it’s spoiling to tell you that only 203 make it to the eleventh. Most of those take deals, so the population that starts the eleventh floor is even smaller. The eleventh floor is a literal parade. It is only three hours and not especially dangerous as the dungeon goes, but of course the dungeon is a super-dangerous place and we can always anticipate a boss battle at the end of each floor.
That boss battle takes an unexpected turn that totally took me by surprise. Yet when it happened, it made perfect sense. It was, in retrospect, obvious that Dinniman had thought this out and carefully laid the groundwork for it to happen.
I am, let me say, blown away with the artistry of the series. It’s wacky and truly funny and one of the best-plotted things I’ve ever read, with distinct characters you can love or hate or not be quite sure how you feel about. It’s also politically incorrect, not to mention occasionally wildly offensive. I will certainly keep reading.
I know a bunch of people who hate, hate, HATE DCC, and I have no difficulty understanding why. They are not wrong, of course. If you read something and you hate it, then you hate it. No one can tell you how you feel.. Others may have a different or even totally opposite reaction. They, too, are right about how it makes them feel.
Sounds intriguing! 💯
And the mad AI running the game going full nihilist is pretty intense!
That’s a lot of those crawlers who don’t make it to the next floor. ⚖️
And that’s very true that people’s perspectives on what they like or don’t like will vary, and art is often pretty subjective like that.
Thank you for sharing this review with us readers! 🙏