Book 28 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. 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.

Yeah I had to go read the second book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series! The first book was fun and fast-paced and charming and got me curious to learn more, so I went ahead and got Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (2024).

As a bit of a recap, if you don’t feel like reading my previous post (or the first book): Earth has been conquered by an intergalactic alien corporation and many of the survivors like Carl have been coerced in participating in a life-or-death reality game show. The ‘crawlers’ must descend through 18 levels of dungeons, each more perilous than the last, and can earn their freedom somewhere around level 11 if they so desire. If they want to save Earth, however, one of them must make it through level 18 — and nobody has ever, in the history of dungeon crawls, ever made it past level 15.

Accompanying Carl on his quest in his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut, who through dungeon shenanigans is now intelligent, articulate, and possibly as powerful as Carl himself. In book one, they are joined by a new pet, a baby velociraptor, and throughout the second book they will make new allies including their dungeon guide Mordecai.

Book one covered Carl and Princess Donut surviving the first two levels of the dungeon, the ‘tutorial levels.’ Book two begins as they enter level 3, where they must choose their races (if they want to change) and their classes, which dictate what special abilities and advantages they will have going forward. But the dungeon has a lot of new twists on level 3, including full cities with their own intrigue, as well as new types of adversaries that are much, much more powerful than they are…

If it isn’t obvious at this point, the dungeon crawl acts very much like a computer role-playing game! The crawlers have stats and levels and gain experience from killing monsters and can collect magic items that boost their abilities. They can undertake quests and join other parties and fight boss monsters and find safe rooms to rest and level up their abilities and unlock loot boxes. They have a finite amount of time on each level before it collapses (currently on the order of a week or so), killing everyone still inside, and they must hunt down the staircase down to the next one before time runs out.

These books are, on the surface, incredibly silly, and that is really a lot of the charm of them! The inherent absurdity of the situation combined with the deliberately comical rules of the game make for a lot of ridiculous situations that, however, often end up with deadly consequences. As in the first book, author Matt Dinniman, through Carl, never lets the reader forget that these games come with a LOT of death and suffering, all to entertain the galactic masses for profit. As I said in my review of the first book, I feel like Dinniman is gently (and rather ironically) wagging his finger at the audience, like “remember that these are all living creatures we’re talking about that are fighting and dying.” he is never preachy about it, however, he just maintains that human connection.

Choosing to keep one’s humanity in the middle of impossible circumstances is an ongoing theme in the second book. Carl is faced with a number of situations where he must choose between the safe path and the moral path. There is also one significant moment where he fears that one of their clever plans may have killed innocent people. The heart of the book series and its characters is I believe one of the reasons it is so compelling and popular.

It occurred to me that another reason the series is popular is that it is fast-paced and consequently super-readable! By the nature of the situation, the plot hardly ever slows down — there simply isn’t time, with the dungeon floor on a countdown to collapse! The book isn’t all action, but something is always happening.

The second book brings the galactic politics and game show popularity politics even more into the story. Though ostensibly Carl and Princess Donut simply have to grow more powerful and get through each level, their survival depends on how popular they are with the fans and how useful they are to the corporations that have financial interests in the games. Also, because there are “real-world” people invested in the games, they can face threats that aren’t directly connected to the games at all. Matt Dinniman plants a lot of seeds for future strife throughout the book (which also adds to its popularity, I imagine).

The title of the book itself is a fun touch. The reader will not understand what it means until the last few pages of the book — and again it sets up implications and consequences that we will likely encounter later.

The character interactions remain a highlight of the book, including of course Princess Donut as well as a more prominent role for Mordecai. The supporting characters are also all entertaining — even when they’re AI programmed.

So it’s safe to say that I’m going to go buy and read book 3 of the DCC series! I will probably head out to do that after finishing this post. I will, however, read something else in between… gotta make the series last!