REVIEW: Carl's Doomsday Scenario (book) by Matt Dinniman

Carl's Doomsday Scenario is a LitRPG SFF book. It's the second in Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

 As is usual with these serial stories, this picks up right where the first book left off, with no real effort made to remind readers of what happened earlier. Even though it wasn't that long ago that I read the first book, it still took me a bit to orient myself, and there were references to characters and events in Book 1 that I couldn't always recall well. For the most part, this wasn't too much of an issue for me.

This entire book takes place on the third floor of Dungeon Crawler World. At the start of it, Carl and Princess Donut are faced with decisions about their race and class, with an overwhelming (to me) number of options available to both of them. After that, it's time to deal with the floor itself, which is more dangerous and has a few new game mechanics added to it. Carl and Donut have only eight days to find an exit to the fourth floor before they're flattened. 

This time around, in addition to regular enemies and bosses, Carl and Donut have to deal with the additional complication of quests and NPCs called "elites."

Carl continues to struggle with the disconnect between the actions that would be best for him and Donut as players of this game and his emotional reaction to the NPCs as individuals. Most of the NPCs Carl encounters have no existence outside of Dungeon Crawler World and never will have one - they and their memories are created solely to add some color to the game and keep players and viewers engaged. That doesn't stop Carl (and Donut) from feeling, on a gut level, that they're like real people.

Dungeon Crawler World really and truly sucks for everyone unwillingly involved in it. Yes, the players (and former players, like Mordecai) have had the world and people they loved suddenly destroyed and now find themselves constantly facing the possibility of death, but the NPCs had my sympathy too, especially when I read the "Backstage and the Pineapple Cabaret" extra (since my copy of Dungeon Crawler Carl was the original self-published version, I hadn't realized that the trad publisher version had a bonus story - interlibrary loan helped solve that problem for me).

As in the first book, Dinniman handled the balance between the humor and deadly circumstances in a way that worked well for me. The villains/enemies continued to be written with more empathy than I sometimes expected - that circus was surprisingly tragic. 

I love Carl and Donut as a pair. I absolutely plan to continue this series.