I have now recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to… six people directly? All six are on my wife’s down line so she’s doing well in this little cultural MLM.
This Inevitable Ruin continues to escalate the emotion in serious ways. It would be difficult to discuss them without spoilers, so I am going to let this be another extremely short review. Let me just say: this is the book where Carl gets to feel feelings for a little bit. He’s spent so much time getting raked over the coals, often literally, that his emotions are mostly broken. This is the book where he gets to have the emotions back at a couple points.
There is one moment I’ll spoil, where we get a former crawler’s perspective, and she uses an item given to her by her sponsor that leads her and her group into a death trap, with the purpose of the trap being to let her death act as an advertisement for the sponsor. It’s a really incredible moment that shows the utter cruelty of the crawl and how little humanity the crawlers are afforded by default. Dinniman has added more and more of these moments each book, and they show how despite the silliness and the foot fetish, this is serious fiction that tells an impressive and emotional story. We care about these characters, we care about what’s happening to them, and we want them to win in spite of the odds.
If you’re still sleeping on this story, stop. 100/10 will read again.