Book Review: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Earth has been transformed into the set of the galaxy’s most watched game show: Dungeon Crawler World, a nightmarish, multilevel, video game–like dungeon filled with traps, monsters, and mind-bending puzzles. Carl and Donut have survived so far, but this fourth level is unlike anything they could imagine. The Iron Tangle: an impossibly complicated subway system tied together into a knot of trains of all kinds, from classic steam engines to sleek modern cars. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations aren’t always what they seem, and the exit is perpetually just a few stops away.

The top ten list is populated, and Carl and Donut have made it. But that popularity comes with a price. They each now have a bounty on their head. They must work with other crawlers to solve the puzzle of the floor, but how can they do that when they don’t know who to trust? The secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly useless book.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman will be published October 22, 2024. Ace Books/Berkley Publishing provided an early galley for review.

We're back again for book three in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I enjoyed book 1 and book 2, so I was ready for another run with our heroes.

By this point in the series, Dinniman's style and narrative rhythms are fairly well-established. We have the voices of the characters; we have the framework of the game and its elements. The new wrinkles are the layout of the level, the secrets behind them and what it will take for Carl and company to get through them. That is the where the freshness comes in each time, especially if each book is only going to give us one level of progression. There is a lot more story to go; Dinniman needs to be careful with how he doles it to avoid either boring or burning out the reader.

The first half of this one was a bit slower for me, for the reasons just noted. However, when the second half hit all of the pieces came together and proceeded at a breakneck pace. Hopefully future volumes will give less of the former and more of the latter.