This Inevitable Ruin is really good, probably one of my favourite books in the whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and after the card game frustrations of book six it was exactly what I needed. I finished it in September and I’ve been itching to talk about it since. This is the book where the crawlers finally make a massive impact, where they stop being pieces on someone else’s board and start hitting back, and it’s so much better than the previous one that it almost doesn’t feel like the same series. It’s a massive win. I came out of it grinning, and it put the whole series right back where it was for me after book five.
The ninth floor is Faction Wars, the biggest floor yet, and the rules are brutal. Nine armies, each backed by a rich alien faction, fight for control of a castle over thirty days, and any of them can pull crawlers into their side. Dead is dead this time, too. No respawns, no second chances, which means every fight has real weight in a way the card battles never did. Carl’s side starts out badly outnumbered and outgunned, up against sides splitting something like a hundred and fifty thousand mercenaries between them, and the whole book is about how he turns that around with every favour and friend he’s built up over six books.
The crawlers finally hit back
What I loved most is how much the crawlers matter in this one. For most of the series they’ve been surviving, scrambling, occasionally pulling off something brilliant, but always on the back foot against a system built to kill them for an audience. Here they get to fight back properly, as a force, and the impact they have on the floor is huge. It feels like the payoff for everything Carl’s been building since the very first book, all those odd alliances and goodwill he’s piled up just by being the kind of person he is.
And then there were the crawlers that had escaped. That was a huge surprise, and an even bigger win. I didn’t see it coming at all. Tens of thousands of retired crawlers turning up to fight changes everything about the war, and it’s one of those moments where the series suddenly shows you how big it really is, and how many people the dungeon has chewed up over the years who are still angry about it. It’s the most unpredictable and bonkers the series has been, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
The way it all comes together for the win at the end is just so satisfying. Without giving too much away, Carl’s side doesn’t win because they’re stronger. They win because they work together better than anyone else on the floor, and because Carl is very good at making people want to fight for him. After a book where the fights were cards hitting cards, getting back to crawlers on their own feet doing the impossible was such a relief.
The NPCs get a side of their own
It’s not only the crawlers either. The NPCs organise themselves into a tenth faction this time and demand to be treated as people rather than furniture, which is a great idea for a series that has always quietly asked what it means to be one of the dungeon’s creations. It adds another side to a war that already had plenty, and it fits so well with what this book is about, everyone who’s been pushed around by the system finally pushing back at once. I loved seeing characters who’ve been background colour for six books suddenly have a stake in how it ends, and some of them turn out to be a lot more dangerous than the armies paying to be there.
The floor is huge and there’s a lot going on, nine armies plus the NPCs plus everyone Carl brings with him, and I can see how all those factions clashing over and over could feel sprawling, even like it’s spinning its wheels in places. For me the size of it was the point. Thirty days of war with permanent death on the line should feel too big to hold in your head, and it does, and every time it cut back to Carl and Donut I knew exactly what was at stake for them in the middle of all that noise. There’s also a late twist about Lucia Mar, the cold, scary kid crawler who’s been a threat for a while, and what her survival is tied to up on the surface, and it’s left hanging in a way that made me want book eight straight away.
The Cookbook authors come back
The other thing I loved was how many members of the Cookbook came back to help. If you’ve been reading since The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, you’ll know the Cookbook has been one of the best ideas in the series, a guide passed from one crawler to the next, written by people who mostly didn’t make it. Getting to meet some of the people behind it, and seeing them throw in with Carl, felt like the series rewarding you for paying attention. I’d half wondered for a while who these people were. Now I know, and it makes every Cookbook entry from the earlier books hit a bit harder.
Milk, who wrote one of the editions, is a highlight, and there’s a real sense of history in those scenes, of a long line of people who all tried to beat this thing before Carl and left whatever they could for whoever came next. Then they all work together to destroy the other factions, and it’s brilliant. It’s the feeling of a team coming together at the end of a heist film, except the team is made of people who’ve been through hell and the heist is a war. I could have listened to a whole book of just them.
It also makes the world feel much bigger. Up to now it’s mostly been Carl, Donut and the people around them, with the rest of the dungeon’s history in the background. This book drags that history into the foreground and makes it part of the fight, and I loved it for that. Even Porthus, the high elf, gets a thread that ties into it, binding himself to the dungeon for a ridiculously long time on the hope of seeing someone again, and it’s one of those small, sad side stories this series keeps tucking in between the explosions.
Katia, Donut and Samantha
The Katia and Donut problem has been hanging over the series since the Crown curse came into play, the idea that only one of them could go on, and I was really dreading how it would play out. I thought it was going to end in a death, and I don’t think I’d have forgiven the book if it had. Instead, there’s a good answer to it. Katia finds a way out of the dungeon altogether, which means Carl and Donut lose her, but to absence rather than to a grave, and it’s sad and right at the same time. It felt like the kind of answer this series is good at, where nobody gets a perfect ending but somebody gets to keep going.
Samantha is even more amazing in this book. I said last time she was starting to grow on me, and she’s fully won me over now. She’s loud and ridiculous and fearless, and she has some of the best moments on the whole floor, the kind where you can’t believe what she’s doing and can’t stop laughing at the same time. She’s become one of my favourite characters in the series, which a couple of books ago I’d never have predicted. Every time she showed up I knew something stupid and wonderful was about to happen. Donut is wonderful too, as always, and the loyalty between her and Katia as they get toward the end really landed for me, because the whole curse was set up to turn them against each other and it just doesn’t take.
I’m still worried about the dungeon
The one thing that’s bugging me more and more is the dungeon AI itself. I’m starting to worry about it a lot. The prologue gives you a peek at why these games were really built in the first place, and it’s grim, and the AI keeps acting in ways I can’t pin down, glitching and getting stranger as things fall apart around it. Back in book one I used to think it was on the crawlers’ side. Now I really don’t know what it wants, and the end of the floor, with gods breaking loose and everything coming apart, didn’t make me feel any better. If anything it made the ending feel like the calm before something much worse.
That’s not a complaint, exactly. It’s the right kind of worry to have going into the next book, the kind that keeps me listening. A series this long needs something to be properly scared of, and it’s found it. But it does mean that even in a book where the crawlers win big, I came out of it feeling like the floor under them is getting less stable by the chapter, and I’m not sure the dungeon is going to be anyone’s friend by the end.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5, and honestly it’s close enough to a 5 that I went back and forth on it.
The escaped crawlers turning up: did you see that coming, or did it catch you as off guard as it caught me? Tell me in the comments.
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I’m still grinning about the escaped crawlers turning up. That and the Cookbook authors coming back made this one feel like a reward for sticking with the series. Was there a returning face you were especially glad to see?