REVIEW: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (book) by Matt Dinniman

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is the sixth book in Dinniman's sci-fi LitRPG series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This is the first book in the series to start with a "the story thus far" bit, which I heartily approve of. Anyway, this book takes place on the eighth floor, "The Ghosts of Earth." This particular floor is a facsimile of Earth in the weeks before the collapse and the start of Dungeon Crawler World. Regions are populated by what are basically recordings of what actually happened on Earth. Biological entities, like humans and animals, can't be interacted with. However, crawlers are able to interact with non-biological items and objects.

The floor is divided into three phases. In the first phase, crawler parties must find and plant flags on a living entity when they are at less than 5% health in order to transform them into something called a T'Ghee totem. In phase 2, the Squad Leader in each party will use a deck populated with T'Ghee totems and other cards to fight for floor exit keys. Phase 3 is a surprise.

Most of what I know about card battling games comes from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. There was definitely some fun in seeing what kind of T'Ghee totems Donut and Carl would manage to collect, although in general the whole card battling system came across as a chaotic mess.

That didn't really matter, though, because more of my focus was on the characters, many of whom were increasingly coming apart at the seams. This, unfortunately, included Carl. Man, I worried (and will continue to worry) about Carl. The guy is so close to hitting his breaking point, and it's not like anything in this series is conducive to rest and relaxation. Donut is a blessing, both for readers and for Carl.

This floor included a lot of monsters based on Earth myths and legends, although they weren't always very accurate due to the aliens not necessarily caring enough to do the proper research. There were a few fun examples I recognized - I particularly got a kick out of the squonk. A word of warning, though: the whole "legendary/mythical beings" aspect was defined very broadly, which may be problematic for some readers. The example that most stuck out to me: Uzi Jesus. 

On just about every floor, Dinniman brings things to the brink of disaster and overwhelming bleakness, only to suddenly throw readers a morsel of hope. Can he keep it up? I sure hope so, but I can't help but be really nervous about the next book. The threads of stuff that could go horribly wrong at any moment keep multiplying.