Woah! So that was a twist at the end of The Butcher’s Masquerade! The crawlers escape the dreaded Hunting Grounds in unprecedented numbers and are gearing up to start a Mad Max-style race when suddenly Pony breaks the whole level, and they get whisked off to the eighth floor without anyone even crossing the starting line! Everyone is disoriented, especially the showrunners who had worked so hard on the seventh floor, but they have to get over it fast because the eighth floor is unlike anything they’ve seen so far. Imagine pokémon (the card game, not the video game), but where the cards come to life, and the match only ends when one of the trainers is dead. That’s the eighth floor! But with even more bull-pucky thrown in for fun. Enjoy all the mayhem in Matt Dinniman’s The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.
[Warning: My review of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride contains some spoilers!]
A new kind of torture for the crawlers
The crawlers have been fighting for their lives for months now, running off pure instinct and reaction. There’s always something happening in the dungeon, so downtime isn’t really a thing there. And that’s probably for the best. If the crawlers had too much time to think about everything they’ve lost, a lot might lose their will to survive. But that’s all going to change on the eighth floor. Oh, they’re still not going to get to relax. What are you, crazy? They’re going to be fighting monsters all over the place. But they’re going to be doing it in a “memory”.
You see, the Syndicate has been spying on us for a long time, and part of that spying has been recording everything (and I mean everything) that we’ve been doing for years. So for the eighth level, they’ve taken those recordings from a few weeks before the collapse and created the floor around them. There are three parts to the level, and for each part, the squad leader has to pick a location on Earth. The squad is then sent to that location and has to complete their objective while surrounded by images of people going about their lives just weeks before the dungeon began. They can’t interact with these “ghost people”, but they will be violently reminded of all that they’ve lost in the wake of the dungeon. It’s meant to be a poignant emotional torture for the pleasure of the viewers at home, and it will certainly hurt the crawlers. But for many of them, especially those like Carl, it will remind them of who the real enemy is and who they should really be fighting.
Engineered blood bath
So in the first part of the eighth level, the crawlers are supposed to run around and try to collect the strongest monsters they can find in their area, turning them into cards (called totems) that they can then use to battle other monsters and crawlers in the second part of the floor. They can only capture twenty monsters, and they can only keep six of them for totems in their decks. They can also earn other cards that affect card battles as prizes to add to their decks.
In the second part of the level (as I said), the crawlers will have to fight ten progressively harder so-called “smart” monsters that have their own deck of cards. If they defeat all ten, they’ll get a key to the stairway down to the ninth floor.
The third phase of the floor is getting back to one of the two stairways to the ninth floor with your key and exiting the floor. The catch is that there are only two keys (stairway-specific) in each area, and each key will only allow one squad to use the stairs. But there are way more than two squads in each area. Translation: crawlers will have to kill each other to get off the floor, and most of them are never leaving.
Of course, all of this is completely unacceptable to Carl. Mordecai keeps telling him that he can’t save everyone, but each crawler that dies is a blow straight to his heart, and Carl is not going to accept that so many have to die. Then he ends up with several of his friends on opposing squads in his area. He and Donut have a key; their friends don’t. Obviously, the showrunners have set this up to force Carl into an impossible choice. But Carl has shown us again and again that when there’s no way out, you make one yourself.
Carl thinks he has a plan that might work, but he isn’t sure. So imagine his shock when a whole bunch of his friends show up to help him with his plan, even though it might mean they all die. Carl doesn’t know what to think; he’s pissed that they won’t go save themselves while he tries to fix everything himself. But the one thing he needs to understand is that this strange group of people that he’s been bringing together is his family now, and they aren’t going anywhere unless they’re all going.
A look into the past solidifies the future
We’ve had hints at Carl’s troubled childhood. We know his dad was an abusive asshole, and his mother tried to get them out, but it didn’t work. In The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, we get a much deeper look at that past. We learn just how awful his dad was. We learn everything his mother did to try to protect him. And we see what happened to his dad after his dad left. Carl learns some pretty sad things and loses things he didn’t even know he had.
It’s a horrible move on the part of the Syndicate. Not just because it’s a nasty thing to do to Carl, but because it backfires on them spectacularly. The more they try to break Carl, the more they galvanize him. Like all dictators, they’ve created their own worst enemy, and they consistently make him stronger as they try to tear him down. There are eighteen floors to the dungeon, and no one has ever made it to the bottom. Carl isn’t going to make it there either. He’s going to destroy them before he ever gets that far, and they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.
Okay, I forgot to mention all the action
I’m realizing that by trying to explain how the floor works and veering off into emotional backstories, I’ve made The Eye of the Bedlam Bride sound a little boring. But it’s a Dungeon Crawler Carl book, so, yeah, it’s got an insane amount of action packed into it. The card battles themselves don’t go down the way they’re really supposed to, but that’s because opponents have a nasty habit of being torn apart in showers of blood and guts before the actual game is over. And I didn’t even mention the zombies or the demon extinction event that takes over the third part of the floor. There is blood, gore, and near-death everywhere. Oh, and the Bedlam Bride! A giant spider demon thing that might or might not be crazy that Carl and Donut make a deal with that won’t possibly backfire on them…
This book is every bit as insane as the rest of the series, so if you’ve been enjoying Carl and Donut’s exploits so far, don’t miss The Eye of the Bedlam Bride!
Rating: 9/10
The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman is available now!
Learn more about the book at the official website for the title.
You might also like…
