Book 29 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.

Okay, I lied. In my last Dungeon Crawler Carl post, I vowed to read another book before continuing the Matt Dinniman authored series. But then I went to the bookstore and bought The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (2024), decided to sit and read for a few minutes, and… off I went.

It says a lot about this series that I haven’t been able to stop reading it — it scratches multiple literary itches for me all at once. There’s the Dungeons & Dragons style of adventure and computer roleplaying game aspects that I am very fond of. There’s the crunchy details of all the loot and insane convoluted plans that Carl and his colleagues concoct that satisfies some neurodivergent part of my brain. And then there’s simply the fact that the story is fun and fast-paced and filled with characters who are simultaneously silly and endearing. Finally, Dinniman has set up a world where literally almost anything can happen — and usually does.

As a quick recap of the premise: an intergalactic alien conglomerate has conquered Earth and impressed many of the survivors into partaking in a deadly game show televised to the universe for fun and profit. The game is a dungeon crawl, where crawlers must survive and fight and wheedle their way down through 18 levels, each more complex and deadly than the last. They must gain magical items and “level up” their own abilities to be able to deal with powerful monsters and deadly traps. On top of that, they have to make themselves entertaining enough that the audience will support them, because fan gifts can make the difference between life and death.

In The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, Carl and his intelligent cat compatriot Princess Donut have passed through the tutorial levels 1 and 2 and the class choosing level 3 and have now entered what might be considered their first “real” level: The Iron Tangle. They find themselves in an underground maze of subway lines that would put the New York City subway to shame. As is true on each level, they only have a limited number of days to find the stairway down to the next level before the current level collapses and kills every crawler left behind. They not only have to deal with monsters more treacherous and deadly than they’ve ever seen before, but they also have to figure out the pattern of the subway in order to find their escape.

Carl and Princess Donut have now made the top ten leaderboard of the dungeon, which means that they are not only unfathomably popular but that they now have a bounty on their head that can be claimed by any crawler that manages to kill them. This is an extra complication, as working together with other crawlers is necessary to figure out how to get to the stairways, but how can you work together with people who might find it more useful to kill you? And this isn’t just an abstract question: the crawler duo accept a new member into their party, Katia, a shapeshifter who got separated from her own party. But where do her loyalties truly lie?

But not everything involves less hope. As what at first appears to be a gag gift, Carl receives a book that he learns is titled The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which contains hard-won secrets of the dungeon he can use to survive. The existence of the book is forbidden, however, so Carl must figure out how to use its secrets without indicating that he got those secrets from the book…

This is the first book I’ve read in ages that came with a bit of a disclaimer from the author! Dinniman notes before the first chapter that the book will contain a lot of confusing details about the subways lines and their connections and how one gets to the exits using them. He reassures the reader that for most of the book these details are relatively unimportant and that all the necessary information will be explained near the end of the book when it’s relevant. To his credit, he’s right! The nature of the twisty tunnels of the Iron Tangle is not as interesting as the exploits the crawlers make to get through it.

This is the first book of the series that really felt like it was starting to touch a little bit on genuine horror. As we get to know more crawlers personally, instead of seeing them as statistics, we see the awful fates that many of them experience and the overall sadistic nature of the AI that runs the Crawl. It starts to feel a bit like a classic Harlan Ellison story. But all this pain and suffering strengthens Carl’s resolve to get revenge on the cruel perpetrators of this game, and the Anarchist’s Cookbook is the first hint of rebellion — a book put together by past crawlers and passed down through generations. We will see much more of Carl’s rebellion start to develop in book 4 — but I’m getting ahead of myself. (Yeah, I already read book 4.)

As I’ve noted in previous posts on this book series, Dinniman does a good job of keeping the human cost of the Crawl in the minds of the reader and the characters and never letting us forget that the games are based on suffering. It never drags down the mood of the books, which are overall silly and fun, but keeps us morally grounded and provides the motivation for the resistance that is clearly coming.

So: another fantastic book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series! Now I will try to read and blog about something else before reading another book in the series, because my brain is starting to think about “buffs” and “cooldowns” and “boss monsters” while I’m trying to fall asleep.