Book 37 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – carrying on through the rest of the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.
This book blog post comes soon after the previous one because I had already read the next Dungeon Crawler Carl book but opted to read something else so that my blog isn’t just 100% Dungeon Crawler Carl! This post is about the 7th book in the series, This Inevitable Ruin (2025), which keeps up the insane compelling momentum of the series.
A quick refresher: Earth has been conquered and most of the population slain by alien invaders. Millions of people were then coerced into entering an 18 level dungeon game run by a near omnipotent AI for the entertainment of the galaxy and the profit of corporate overlords. This dungeon operates much like a videogame: all the players have stats and skills that can be leveled up through use and through magical items and reward boxes, there are monsters to be slain, deadly traps and puzzles to be survived, and dangerous quests inflicted on the players. Any crawlers who make it to level 10 or lower can buy their way out of the crawl into an indentured servitude, with the deals getting better the deeper they go. If a crawler survives to level 18, they can earn the complete freedom of their world — but no crawler in the history of the game on countless planets has ever made it past level 15.
Carl entered the dungeon because he had no choice — he had gone outside in the winter to fetch his ex-girlfriend’s cat Donut from a tree when all buildings in the world collapsed. Wearing only boxer shorts, he had to enter the dungeon to avoid freezing to death, and Donut came with him. Donut quickly became intelligent and a fellow crawler (don’t ask how, it’s a whole other story) and the two of them have fought their way down in the levels and to the top of the crawler leaderboard.
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