Review:
The surviving crawlers have made it to the sixth floor, "The Hunting Grounds," where they get a 30 hour grace period before hunters who will be trying to kill them are released. After the way the fifth floor wrapped up, a lot of those hunters will specifically want to kill Carl (although one group in particular has brought along some truly horrifying arrows just for Louis). Also, it's time for Carl to fulfill his side of the desperate bargain he made with the producers of Vengeance of the Daughter way back on the third floor.
Another floor means more nonstop action and the introduction of a bunch of new complications to Carl and Donut's already very complicated existence.
How depressed will the later entries in this series leave me? It's a question that's been in the back of my mind for a while. Yes, we have times (like in the previous volume) when Carl manages to strike back some, but it's highly unlikely that there will be a "good" ending for the main characters, much less all the side characters readers might get attached to. The world in which this all takes place sucks. It's a capitalist hellhole in which the vast majority are left to fight for scraps in order to live, if they're allowed any sort of life at all. Not only that, this volume included a death I had thought would still be a ways off, and set things up for a future death that's going to be gut-wrenching.
So yeah, the darker aspects of this series are becoming more prominent, and if anything ends up killing my desire to continue reading, it will be that. For now, though, the darkness has yet to overshadow the bizarro fun moments, my interest in seeing what Carl will manage to pull off next, and my love of characters like Donut and Mongo. Still, for every triumphant assassination and bonkers talent show, there's horror-tragedy like Growler Gary.
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