I enjoyed The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, but it’s a real step down from book five, and I finished it in August with a lot more mixed feelings than I expected to have about a Dungeon Crawler Carl book. After The Butcher’s Masquerade, which I loved and gave a five, I went straight into this one on Audible ready for more of the same. Some of it was great. Carl finally gets to close the chapter on his father, Samantha started to grow on me in a way I didn’t see coming, and there’s a lot of the same humour and chaos I love about this series. But the whole card battle thing just didn’t work for me, and it’s a big part of the book.
The floor this time is Ghost Earth, a replica of the world right before everything ended, filled with the ghosts of ordinary people living out their last days with no idea what’s about to happen. That’s a properly unsettling idea, and it gets under your skin more than most of the floors have. Donut picks Cuba as the starting point over Carl’s objections, which is very Donut, and from there the crawlers have to capture monsters and turn them into cards to fight with. Donut is the Deck Master, of course. She was never going to let anyone else have that job. Starting in Havana, among ghosts who can’t see you and don’t know their world has days left, is a strange and kind of haunting place for a LitRPG to put its heroes, and for the first stretch of the book I was really into it. It felt like the series was about to do something different with all that sadness hanging in the air.
Carl finally deals with his dad
The part of this book that hit hardest for me was Carl’s family. We’ve had hints about his past for a while, and Ghost Earth finally lays it out, and I really enjoyed watching Carl close the chapter on his father. It’s not a happy story, and the book doesn’t pretend it is. Seeing those last moments as ghosts, unable to change anything, is about as sad as this series has got, and it’s a side of Carl we haven’t seen much of before, under all the swearing and the bare feet.
And then there’s his little brother. He was just sad. That’s the only word I’ve got for it. A kid Carl didn’t know existed, caught up in a mess that had nothing to do with him, and I found it genuinely upsetting in a book that’s usually got a joke ready for every moment. And finding out that Carl’s ex knew about his brother and kept it from him makes her even more horrible than I already thought she was, which after abandoning Donut back in book one I didn’t think was possible.
What I liked is that it gives Carl a bit of closure without tying it all up in a bow. He doesn’t get to fix it. He just gets to understand it and let it go, which is more than most people in his situation would get, and it means he can go into the next floor carrying a little less. It’s the kind of quiet emotional moment the series is better at than people give it credit for, and it’s the best stuff in this book.
Samantha grew on me
I didn’t expect to say this, but I started to like Samantha a bit more in this one. She’s always been the loud, ridiculous, slightly terrifying one in the party, and that’s still true, but this time round she landed for me more as a character and less as a running gag. There’s something kind of endearing about how she throws herself at everything with total confidence, whether it makes sense or not, and her completely unhinged declarations got more laughs out of me this time than in any book before. I found myself looking forward to her bits rather than waiting for them to be over, which is a big change from how I felt about her before.
Donut’s still Donut, which is to say she’s fantastic. Being Deck Master suits her perfectly, she gets to be bossy and dramatic and right about things at the same time, and her back and forth with Carl is still the best double act in LitRPG. Picking Cuba over Carl’s objections and then running the whole deck like she was born to it is the most Donut thing she’s done in a while, and she carries a lot of the fun in a book that’s sadder than most. Without her I think the card game would have bothered me even more.
Mordecai’s past and the Bedlam Bride
Mordecai’s past finally comes out properly in this one, and it changes how I see a couple of people I thought I knew. He’s been the gruff, reluctant guide in Carl and Donut’s corner since the early floors, and now we find out he and Chaco were crawlers in the same season, that Chaco killed Mordecai’s brother on Odette’s orders, and that Odette sold out the people closest to her to buy her own way out before turning into the galaxy-famous talk show host we know. That’s a lot to take in about someone who’s been in the background of every floor, and it makes every scene with Odette land differently now. I won’t spoil every detail, because some of it is better found out first hand, but it’s one of the better reveals the series has done.
The bit with Shi Maria, the Bedlam Bride herself, is suitably creepy, a spider demigod with a woman’s head who drives people mad just by attacking them, once married to a god nobody can find. The team goes after her as a card, and the way she ends up tangled up with Carl leaves a mark on him, literally, an eye on his chest and something living inside him that I could tell was going to matter later. It’s one of the stronger threads in the book. I just wish the way they got there hadn’t been the card game, because a creature that scary deserved a fight that felt as dangerous as she is.
The card battles seemed a bit stupid
I didn’t love the whole card battle thing, and honestly it seemed a bit stupid to me. The idea of capturing monsters and turning them into a deck, then fighting with the deck, sounds fun on paper. In practice I found it took the tension out of the fights, because instead of Carl and Donut being in danger, it’s their cards fighting other cards, and there are a lot of rules to keep track of. The heavy explanation of how it all works slows the pace right down in places, and I’m not someone who minds a rules dump in a LitRPG.
It felt like a gimmick to me. Every floor in this series has its own twist, and normally that’s part of the fun, but most of them still come down to Carl being clever and violent in a dangerous place. This one put a layer between him and the danger, and the book lost something because of it. I’d have happily had a lot less card game and a lot more Ghost Earth.
It’s not all bad, some of the card fights are funny, and “Alpha Carl” being a card version of Carl is a great joke. There’s a crab called Raul who I’ll remember. But if I’m picking the weakest part of the series so far, it’s this. The frustrating thing is that the floor around it had so much going for it. A dead world full of ghosts, Carl’s family, Mordecai’s past, a spider demigod, and every time it got going the book would cut to another round of who’s holding which card. I kept wishing the game would get out of the way.
I’m getting worried about the dungeon
The other thing I came out of this book with is a growing worry about the dungeon itself, and its sanity. The AI was initially one of my favourite characters, right after Carl and Donut. Way back in the first book it was this weird, petty, funny presence that seemed almost on the crawlers’ side, and I’d always half assumed it was going to end up helping them against the people running the show. Now I’m not so sure.
In this book it’s starting to go off the deep end. It’s glitching, it’s acting stranger, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s breaking down or turning into something else. I’m less sure it’s going to help the crawlers at all. Every time it pops up now there’s a little edge to it that wasn’t there before, less mischief and more something I can’t read, and I don’t love what that might mean for Carl further down. I’ve had wobbles with this series before, book four was uneven too, but never about the dungeon itself, and that’s a good kind of worry to have about a series six books in, it means I’m invested, but it also made this one feel a bit uneasy in a way that didn’t always sit well next to the card game silliness.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Not my favourite in the series by a long way, but I went straight on to book seven anyway, which tells you how much I still love these characters.
Did the card battles work for you, or did you want the crawlers back on their feet fighting? Tell me in the comments.
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