Book Review

I understand the concept of a protagonist losing before winning. Every progression fantasy series does it. But there’s a difference between a setback that earns its place in the story and a book where the author just seems to hate his own main character. The Dungeon Predator is the second one.

Tad gets tortured to hell for no reason that actually pays off. He still can’t become a creator. Liz — who I’d been rooting for as a genuinely interesting antagonist-turned-ally — is just straight-up evil now, no nuance, no redeeming angle, just evil. People die. His family gets captured. His son gets killed. There is not one good thing that happens across the entire book, and I don’t say that lightly after four volumes of a series that’s put this guy through the wringer already.

The son’s death is the one moment I’ll give real credit to. I wasn’t expecting it, and the way it lands — the aftermath, the weight the author lets it carry rather than rushing past it — is genuinely the most affecting writing in the book. If there’s a single reason to keep going after this one, it’s that Konrad Ryan proved he’s willing to actually pull the trigger on consequences instead of teasing them and backing off. That’s rare in this genre, where authors love to threaten permanent stakes and then find a loophole two chapters later.

Everything else about book five is a mess, though. A huge chunk of it — I’d put it at close to half — is explanation. Not worldbuilding that moves the plot, just characters standing around narrating the mechanics of what just happened or what’s about to happen. If you’ve read enough LitRPG you know the genre has a tolerance for infodumping most fiction doesn’t, but even by that standard this drags. I found myself skimming paragraphs to get back to something happening.

And the power system — the thing that’s supposed to be the scaffolding holding this whole series together — gets thrown out the window here. Rules that held for four books stop applying. New mechanics show up because the plot needs them to. It stopped feeling like a consistent system and started feeling like the author was making it up as he went, which is exactly the failure mode progression fantasy is supposed to avoid. When I read this genre, the appeal is watching a coherent system get mastered. Book five breaks that contract.

The Adam and Eve angle the plot leans into is just lame. I won’t spoil the specifics, but it’s the kind of high-concept twist that sounds clever in a pitch meeting and falls flat on the page. Combined with everything else, the back half of this book reads less like a story and more like a fever dream — things happening because they’re dramatic, not because they follow from what came before.

Here’s my bigger worry: the series is dragging. Five books in, and instead of closing loops, Ryan keeps opening new ones. Every time Tad takes a step forward, he gets knocked six steps back, and after a while that stops feeling like tension and starts feeling like the author doesn’t have an endgame in sight. I’ve stuck with plenty of long-running LitRPG series — I still haven’t forgiven some of them for the same sin — and The Dungeon Slayer is teetering on that edge right now.

Am I dropping it? No, probably not. But this is, without question, one of the worst entries in the series so far, and if Ryan doesn’t start paying off some of what he’s been stacking up, book six needs to be the redemption arc — for the series, not just the character.

If you’re newer to the genre and want a cleaner example of the “trapped in a brutal system, has to level up or die” setup without five books of accumulated baggage, I’d point you at Mark of the Fool instead — it’s tighter and the power system actually stays a power system. For anyone unfamiliar with the genre conventions this series leans on, LitRPG as a category is built around exactly this tension between game-like systems and narrative stakes — which is precisely the tension book five fumbles.

Book six, The Dungeon Titan, is next on my list. It’s going to have a lot of ground to make up.

Book six took its time getting started, and for most of its length, that was a problem.

After Ethan’s death in the previous book, Tad goes completely off the deep end, and Gerald hauls him into Titan before dying along the way, which tells you exactly what tone this book is opening on. The first 80% of The Dungeon Titan is a slog, and I don’t say that as a throwaway complaint. It’s SUPER depressing, page after page, as Tad has to claw his way back from grief while also regaining lost memories, fighting off a rotating cast of monsters, and rebuilding whatever’s left of his power at the same time. Three separate arcs running in parallel, all of them heavy, none of them letting up. I found myself putting this one down more than any other book in the series so far.

The one thing that makes the slog make sense is the mechanic Ryan builds it around: Titan’s time dilation runs at something like 4 million to 1. Tad has more time in there than he knows what to do with — which, frankly, is more time than my calendar’s ever given me. But that same abundance of time is exactly why the pacing drags. When your character has functionally unlimited time to sit with his trauma, the book sits with it too, chapter after chapter.

Push through that 80%, though, and this book delivers the best sequences in the series to date. Tad finally meets Zero — an encounter this series has been building toward for a long time — and their battle is genuinely tumultuous, easily the best-choreographed fight Ryan has written. The Tad-and-Fenrir dynamic, which has been simmering for books, finally gets its reconciliation, and it comes with its own standalone battle that’s just as strong. After a first two-thirds this heavy, having the back third actually deliver on tension it’s been holding for volumes is a real relief.

We still don’t get the girlfriend reunion — that’s clearly being saved for book seven — but the power explanation Ryan gives here, laying out how Tad’s abilities stack up against a creator’s supposedly infinite power, is one of the better mechanical breakdowns in the series. I’m not fully sold on it, though. Calling something “infinite” and then describing limits on it is a contradiction I can’t quite get past — infinite means infinite, full stop, and the book wants to have it both ways.

Six books in, I’m starting to feel the length of this series more than I want to. It’s not that the story’s lost me, it’s that I’d like a real conclusion at some point instead of another open loop stacked on the last one. And I’ll be honest about where my enthusiasm sits for what’s coming: word is book seven shifts into Zero’s point of view, and that’s not a perspective I’m dying to sit inside. I get what Ryan’s likely going for — making us empathize with the guy who’s spent six books being the thing everyone fears — but antagonist redemption arcs are a hard sell for me even when they’re well-executed.

If there’s a standout character in Titan beyond the two leads, it’s Fader — or possibly “Chuchu,” I genuinely can’t pin down the spelling from the audiobook, which tells you how much of this series I’m consuming on the move rather than on the page. Either way, that character earns their moments here, and the twist involving Omega was one of the more interesting turns in a book that otherwise plays its cards pretty straight.

If you read The Dungeon Predator and came away wondering whether Ryan had a plan or was just piling on misery, Titan is at least a partial answer — the misery was building toward something. Whether that’s enough to justify six books and counting is the question I’m still sitting with. If you want dungeon-core progression without the misery, I’d point you at Chrysalis instead — same machinery, none of the grief. For anyone newer to the genre wondering what “infinite power” claims like this usually mean in LitRPG and progression fantasy, the honest answer is: it depends entirely on whether the author is willing to commit to the math, and Ryan still isn’t, quite.

Cautiously in for book seven, even if that means sitting through more of Zero’s point-of-view chapters along the way.