Book 33 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for 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.
I have continued my read through of all the currently published books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman and have recently finished the 5th book in the series, The Butcher’s Masquerade (2025)!
The book continues Carl and his sassy talking cat Princess Donut as they continue to fight their way down through levels of a deadly dungeon as part of a game show for an intergalactic alien civilization. Earth was essentially leveled by this civilization in order to make the show, and if Carl and Donut can survive to level 11, they can buy their freedom. If they can “win” the deepest level, level 18, they can win the freedom of the entire Earth… but no crawler in the history of the games has made it past level 15.
The dungeon behaves like a computer roleplaying game, with the Crawlers building up their stats and skills, accomplishing quests, and choosing character classes with special abilities. Every floor has its own deadly twist, as well, giving the Crawlers something new and deadly to deal with. When the crawl began, there were millions of people participating; by book 5, the numbers are down to the level of thousands.
As the book begins, Carl and Donut enter level 6, the Hunting Grounds, in which alien participants have paid for the privilege of hunting down Crawlers in the style of The Most Dangerous Game. The Hunters are not invulnerable, however, and can be killed by the Crawlers or the environment, although they are given many advantages to tip the skill in their favor. Carl doesn’t care, however, and has issued a vow to eliminate all the Hunters if he can and he issues an open challenge to the Hunters to track him down. They also learn that the end of the level, before it collapses, will be capped by a party held by a super-powerful NPC. This party, the Butcher’s Masquerade, will bring together Hunters and the top 50 Crawlers in an ostensibly peaceful gathering. Carl is quite certain that it will be a deadly trap engineered for ratings. He and Donut are in the top 50 and can attend the party but are temped to skip it and head down the stairs to the next level early. If they do, however, they would be abandoning many of their friends to death…
The Butcher’s Masquerade continues the dramatic shift that began in the previous book, where Carl is no longer simply a participant in the Dungeon Crawl but is actively working to take revenge on the showrunners that created it and who have destroyed much of the Earth. By the end of The Gate of the Feral Gods, he had taken a really big overt action to screw up the fun of the elites in a future level of the dungeon, and in this book he has vowed to end the lives of as many hunters as possible.
It really started in the previous novel but in this book one really starts to feel the story evolve into horror as well as science fiction. In the first couple of books, the absurdity of the situation kept the story light, and the anonymity of most of the deaths kept things abstract — the deaths felt like statistics, not people. By The Butcher’s Masquerade, however, we have gotten to know many of the Crawlers and their allies and their deaths — often gruesome and tragic — are starting to hit much harder. Even Carl warns his allies in the book that things are going to get much worse before they get better. This doesn’t mean that the book is grim or particularly horrific, only that we as readers have become much more personally invested in everyone’s fates.
We also find that Carl has become much more intwined in the politics of the Crawl and of the aliens running it! He manages not just to be near the top of the Crawler leaderboard but having an impact on events outside of the dungeon. We get more glimpses of workings behind the scenes and come to realize that the intergalactic civilization is not as all-powerful or stable as it first appeared. And, perhaps, it can be brought down.
This book in particular carries the same vibes as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 version of The Running Man, where the hero is supposed to be prey for the Hunters as entertainment but turns out to be much more resilient and deadly than expected, to the delight of the audience!
I am again really impressed with how many moving pieces Dinniman manages to keep in the air in these stories. Small characters or events from several books back can resurface in big, impactful ways that are incredibly satisfying. The only downside is that it is getting more challenging to keep up with all of these pieces, and there have been a couple of times when I’ve had to go look someone up because I couldn’t remember who they were!
The Butcher’s Masquerade at the finale of the book lives up to its name, and is a party of utter unpredictable carnage and tragedy that manages to bring the book to a satisfying conclusion. All sorts of characters come crashing together in one chaotic event, and it is clear how the events of the party will reverberate through the rest of the series.
So, this is another remarkable book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series!
