Book Review – The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman

Goddammit, Donut. Why are these books so addicting? Why is it so hard to stop reading them? I can only think of two other times when I was sucked so hard into a series of books that it put the majority of my unread bookshelf on the backburner. One was Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and the other was Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing series. Okay, the Hunger Games novels sucked me in too so make it three other times. Matt Dinniman is in good company.

The story in book six picks up after the players managed to break the seventh floor which meant they skipped it and were sent directly to the eighth floor instead. This floor took humanity’s folklore and created monsters based on region specific stories. The Pacific Northwest had Bigfoot, so you see where this is headed. The monsters, however, aren’t exact and the game’s AI obviously took some liberties as it slowly goes power hungry insane. Carl and Donut end up in Cuba where they must collect six cards based on these monsters that they must almost defeat before they can collect and then convince to work for them on boss battles. The only way to get a key to open the door for the stairwell to the ninth floor is by defeating a round two boss. Sounds easy enough, right?

In typical Matt Dinniman fashion, Donut – as the designated leader of their group – collects a character named Uzi Jesus who is wildly entertaining when his card is pulled. There is also Shi Maria, a spider creature who agrees to work with Donut and Carl if they agree to take her card to the ninth floor. She once married a god who went missing. She’s the most powerful card they find so it’s essential to their survival that they agree to her demands.

As they collect cards, it becomes apparent to Carl that this floor is going to include every crawler still alive having to face their own demons. The AI has set it up so that their darkest moments and secrets are literally going to come back and haunt them. Face these dark moments and get a key or perish on the floor. In Carl’s case, he must face the father who abandoned him only to find he and a brother he didn’t know about. He discovers from Donut that his ex-girlfriend, Bea, knew and didn’t tell him after she took over his facebook page and the brother contacted him.

This only reinforces who Carl’s real family is – the crawlers he has met in the dungeon. The people who he has gone out of his way to save. Along with themes of found family, this book also deals with addiction as Katia had become addicted to several drugs during the crawl and now must be weaned off of them. This addiction goes hand in hand with Katia putting on a tiara that Donut once wore at the beginning of the series. It had transferred to Katia long after Donut took it off and it reentered the dungeon with someone else. Both of them wearing it during the crawl means that only one of them can leave the next floor alive. Katia has found a way around this, and it sends Donut and Carl on a side quest to assassinate NPC Astrid in the Guild of Suffering which Carl has access to. This gets accomplished, but at great cost. It destroys the Desperado Club, a place for crawlers and NPCs to meet and drink and plan and trade.

Carl and Donut have also bought their way onto the board that controls the Faction Wars – the ninth level’s theme. Carl wants the tourists – rich aliens and the leaders of multiple planets – who come in to kill crawlers to also have their own mortality in play. He eventually asks the AI to put a vote out to the fans in the universe, and they vote to allow everything he was demanding. Going to make for an epic ninth floor battle now that the aliens coming in to kill them will also be at risk of dying.

Once they figure out that there aren’t enough keys for all the groups left on the eighth floor, Carl comes up with an audacious plan to essentially break the ending to the eighth floor too which will allow an unprecedented amount of crawlers through to the next level. Taking down the Syndicate responsible for the crawl has become his obsession and it is making him a bit mad. Crazy. Verbally violent. But he never seems to lose his humanity which is what makes him such a great character. Getting out of this floor will mean breaking his promise to Shi Maria about bringing her to the next floor and she essentially tattoos her soul onto his chest so she can’t leave her behind.

Not only does he now have her soul with him until he finds a way to evict it, Carl also has the god Embress who he pledged loyalty to on a previous floor giving him dangerous powers. Carl’s madness in the face of the game’s creators is now amplified by these two deities, giving fiery power to his anger.

And then there’s Samantha, the profane blow-up porn doll head who has a lot of powers that Carl is just now discovering and he is beginning to realize how very dangerous she might be. For now, he keeps her as an ally even if she keeps threatening to kill everyone’s mother. Like the other books in this series, the book is so action packed that it’s impossible to talk about it all in a review. Read the books, my friends. They are nihilistic and irreverent and funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. Matt Dinniman gives the characters humanity in the face of impossible odds and it’s a great read.

4.5 out of 5 stars.