Book Review – The Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

It’s the ninth floor of the dungeon. The Faction Wars floor. Certain death permeates through each faction because the system’s rogue A.I. allowed for all the alien factions to also die in the dungeon if they don’t win. Permanently. Their lives are also tied to this war they chose to be part of in the effort to senselessly kill crawlers who had no choice in the matter. Enter Carl and Donut who have united a large number of crawlers and allied themselves with self aware NPCs. With them, crawlers from previous dungeons who have returned to the crawl to help Carl and his friends burn the system to the ground.

But there is a catch. Donut, Carl’s cat and friend, and Katia, one of Carl’s closest allies in the dungeon, both wore the crown of the sepsis whore, an item given by the A.I., and because the crown puts you in line for the throne of the Blood Sultanate on the ninth floor it has dire consequences. Not only do you have to kill all members of that family in order to leave the floor, but both Donut and Katia cannot leave the ninth floor without one of them killing the other because they both wore the crown at one point.

Fortunately, Katia had found a way out of the mess on the previous floor but she and Donut still need events to go their way in order for her plan to work. Like every other book in this series, nothing goes according to plan. The other factions are using Carl’s own plans against him. The A.I. keeps changing the rules at the last moment. And the God that Carl was forced into worshiping in an earlier book has tasked him with another impossible task.

Everyone outside the dungeon suspects that Carl has the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook which he received in his inventory on the fourth floor. He has kept it quiet that he has it but because the book contains secrets and recipes for things he should not know, people suspect that he has either gotten outside help or has this book in his inventory. It makes his allies, some of whom also had this book in their possession during their crawl, trust him more and his enemies try harder to kill him.

The Princess Posse, led by Carl and Donut, is still the emotional core of this storyline. Carl worries that the power that Donut has acquired is ruining her mentally as she is required to kill using what the system A.I. call ‘atrocities’ in order to survive the floor. The vast majority of their allies end up entangled in a large ball with two Gods. When their friends are finally freed from this horror, they all pretend for Donut’s sake that they did not remember any of it and did not experience pain. Donut believes this, but Carl knows the truth.

For his part, Carl also finds himself using ring that allows him to mark people for death. Once he kills these marks, his crawler ranking goes up exponentially but at a cost. It means ending the life of other living things. Carl has to choose between having unbridled power by killing or putting living things above his need for that power and what it is doing to him mentally. He has to choose between his own humanity and becoming a heartless killer. Still, seven books in, he refuses to be broken.

While the fun of the series goes out of the story a bit in this book because just surviving the crawl is one thing. Surviving a war is a whole other level of stress because Donut and Carl have doomed several factions to death for their own survival. That doesn’t mean this book isn’t fun. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so chuck full of penis jokes. Laughing out loud is something I did often when listening to this audiobook. Perhaps that is why Matt Dinniman put in a God shaped like a giant dick. He knew he could tell countless jokes with it. I mean, he drops a Lorena Bobbitt pun which had me in stitches. Nihilistic phallic humor at its finest.

And now I wait patiently for May 12. Like many, we know it’s the release date of book eight. If you haven’t read any of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, start at the beginning. Dinniman’s books aren’t written in such a way that you cannot start in the middle of the series without feeling lost. He has created a narrative so steeped in lore that it’s hard to stop reading once you start.

4.5 out of 5 stars.