The Notebook
This is a review for A Parade of Horribles, which is #8 in Dungeon Crawler Carl.
First off, I have never read DCC. I came into this at book 8. We’re going to ignore the circumstances of how this came to pass. I’d heard of DCC, but never felt inclined to read it. I’m not a LitRPG person. Really just isn’t my thing. But I had the book in my possession with enough time to read it.
I’m still not a LitRPG person. For me, it has all the excitement of going over to your cousin’s house in the 90s to play video games. And by play video games, I mean, watch your cousin play single-player video games while narrating everything he does without really explaining anything.
Again, this is book 8, one-and-a-half away from the finish* and I can respect that I’m just not up to speed on everything. Therefore, it would be unfair to criticize specific plot elements or character progression.
This review, then, is going to focus on three elements of the overall craft. The first is going to be the Big Reveal (no spoilers).
Parade of Horribles was said to contain this really big, really lore-heavy twist at the end. Like, all the little clues that have been floating around are going to come together in an astounding way and act as the catalyst going into book 9. When I heard that, I figured that the majority of it was going to go over my head. Again, latecomer skipping dungeon floors.
Unfortunately, I deciphered the Big Reveal about a quarter of the way through. I still wasn’t really familiar with any of the characters, had only a nascent sense of what was going on with all of the “gods” and whatnot, but I figured it out. I didn’t really know that I had figured it out, as I was still expecting some big thing. But when I got to the point of the Big Reveal—and it’s a glaringly obvious BR; the AI loves him some monologuing—I realized that I had it figured out. I knew where all this had come from, what the Big Secret of the Dungeon was, and where it was going.
I, someone who just jumped in at book 8, having no clue about anything that had happened in the previous seven books, watching as inside joke after inside joke passed me by and knowing that I was missing those jokes and the plot beats that went with them, figured out the Big Reveal two hundred pages in.
And this leads me to my next focus for this review, which is the characters. Again, newcomer. Waving at the inside jokes as they pass by.
I never felt like any of the characters actually were characters until about three-quarters of the way through. At no point in the first half of the book did I feel substance or agency from any of them. Even now, at the end, with exception of Donut and Carl, I can’t really tell you who’s who. No one has a voice or a unique personality that lets me distinguish them. Someone talking about the series said that (I think it was) Elle wandered into the dungeon as a dementia patient and basically turned into this kick-ass grandma. I never would have guessed that. I never got a sense of anything about her other than her sex and that she’s a crawler. I don’t know anything about her. Or Imani. Or Chris. Or Louis. Or any other characters whose names I don’t remember because they don’t mean or do anything. Carl once mentions that someone is the “brains” or the “planner” or something to that effect, but if he hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have known. Not a good place to be at 500 pages in. Prepotente has more development, and he’s a goat. Even Carl didn’t register as a true character until about three-quarters of the way through. Only Donut registered as having any kind of personality, but she remains as dull as everyone else, existing only for glamor, Marvel-level quips, and to occasionally toss out a spell.
Basically, stuff just happens and the characters do the things. Their whole function is basically just exposition, filler, and Carl’s Cannon Fodder. Any one could be replaced by any other and change nothing. Some of them could be replaced with suitcases and change nothing.
As an aside, I get the sense that there may be some intent here, that the AI is pushing them hard and fast, trying to cause them to panic so they can’t sit around and plot and plan and scheme. Why would it give them that advantage? And the result is a lot of crawler deaths. I can respect that, too. And yet, if I am supposed to get the sense that Carl is of superior intelligence that he is able to survive such time constraints, thrive in such adversity, and cleverly navigate this horrific dungeon where those of inferior intellect perish, I’m not getting any of that. All I’m getting is a sense of a massive Luck stat and ridiculous plot armor in the form of “The AI likes him for some reason.”
This brings me to my third point, and that is the worldbuilding. Diniman has mentioned that he has a spreadsheet containing over 200 pages of all the stats and spells and items and everything else so he can reference them. If true, that’s impressive, and I applaud such attention to detail. Unfortunately, reading along, it’s like trying to play a game with your seven year old nephew who is constantly flouting the written rules and making up more of his own so that no matter what, he’s always right, you’re always wrong, and he always wins.
Again, there is a sense of intent as the AI has “broken containment”. Except that doesn’t seem to mean anything. Rules exist when they’re convenient, and they don’t exist when they aren’t. This turns the entire book into one giant monologue on the part of the AI, like a cut-rate comic book villain.
As much as authors and readers talk about “stakes” in a novel or a series, how much tension is lost when you try to play the death game too early? Oh no, Carl and Donut have to survive these jacked up Mario Kart from Hell races. It’s chapter three. They’re not going to die. Granted, they don’t know that, nor did they know that in book one or two. But the world isn’t built to sustain anything other than them. Think of Lord of the Rings. Excellent characters, all expendable, all of them merely existing to serve the story. The One Ring wants to return to Sauron. The One Ring is the hidden main character of the series, and it dies in the end. Every other character exists to serve that purpose. The whole world has grown up around the mythos of the Dark Lord and the One Ring. Frodo and Sam and Gandalf and all of them are incidentals. If they perish, there is still a world. There is still a plot. There is still an evil that can and must be vanquished.
DCC is a tantrum-throwing AI playing hard and fast with its toys and the world it created for them. The only standing rule is the Rule of Cool. Everything else is secondary and can be changed at any time, to the chagrin of anyone trying to play with the toddler. The characters are mass-produced dolls with half a dozen unique phrases that they’ll parrot when the string is pulled. The Big Reveal carries all the weight of a Scooby Doo unmasking.
(But if Carl et al die, there is still the evil AI that must be vanquished, like Sauron and the Ring.)
Except the logic required to do so is beyond the human scope. By the chaos of the in-game world, there is no reason the AI should be struggling or even worried. There is no reason Carl should be succeeding except plot armor. By the logic of the outer world, the humans don’t mean anything. The dolls can’t stop the toddler from throwing its tantrum and Mom has no need to employ their help. From this, the human cause is doomed and it’s not much of a story. But if the humans have “help” from the outside, the story itself is diminished, largely because the characterization is so weak.
Again, LotR, the objective was destroying the One Ring (or it being returned to Sauron). Aragorn besieging the Black Gate meant nothing against the infernal forces of Sauron if the Ring was not destroyed. At the same time, Frodo and Sam needed the distraction; they needed Sauron’s eye off of them so they could scale Mount Doom and destroy the Ring. The two sides worked together, even if they didn’t fully understand that they were working together. And for the Ring, it needed just one side or the other to fail so that its objective could be fulfilled. There were no other possible outcomes.
No sense of any of this coming from DCC. It’s a lot of watching, waiting, insane schemes that work via Luck and Plot Armor, and cannon fodder.
* One book left, but it was getting so long and demanded so much stuff, Diniman is splitting it into two books, but I’m still counting it as one.
