Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning. This is a full recap of A Parade of Horribles, by Matt Dinniman, book eight of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It gives away everything, the ending included, and the book has heavy swearing, gore and a lot of death. If you haven’t read it, come back after. If book nine is next and book eight has gone fuzzy, stay.
Here is the short answer. The book covers two floors. The tenth floor is a seven heat race in cars and mounts, set in a town called Hungry Eyes. The eleventh floor is a parade that ends in a boss fight. Carl and Donut lose a lot of friends, sneak hundreds of crawlers toward an escape, and end the book with a new party member who used to be the final boss of the whole dungeon.
I split the ninety eight chapters, the interludes and the epilogue into stops, and every number comes from the text.
Before The Race: Two Openers
The book opens with Samantha’s recap of book seven, and she tells it badly on purpose. She mixes up what happened in Faction Wars, who died, and who left, and her thoughts go fuzzy every time she remembers her own child. It is a joke, but the main facts are in there. Carl and Donut won Faction Wars. The War Mage Rebellion stole the Gate of the Feral Gods. Katia left the dungeon.
Then comes an interlude with a Naga lawyer named Chandra. Her uncle has taken the Naga throne. She uses Widow’s Rights to claim Carl as her husband in Naga court, and a public jury votes to allow it. As his wife she starts taking control of the money from Donut’s merchandise. She is also billed as Donut’s attorney. Donut tells her to her face that the Princess Posse is much bigger than she thinks.
Chapters One To Eleven: The First Heat
Chapter one opens on the tenth floor. Five thousand, five hundred and one crawlers remain. Carl and Donut land in a garage with a gremlin mechanic named Hedy and a second gremlin applicant, Waldrip Chris.
A giant wheel decides the vehicle. Donut picks Hedy, and Waldrip Chris explodes. The truck is a food truck with a tommy gun on the roof and a horn that plays a gangster’s voice. The rules are strict. Only one of you drives each heat. Come in last, and you are eliminated.
In heat one, a bugbear van crashes. Rather than leave the bugbears behind, Carl builds a trailer and tows them to the finish. His reason is simple. If more than one team fails, he will have to race against friends. They finish in seventh place.
In the safe room, Mordecai is a floating reaper. Donut opens a godslayer box and one front paw glows blue. The boon is permanent, and her claws tear a table in half.
Chapters Twelve To Twenty-Six: Hungry Eyes
Hungry Eyes is a town in the style of the nineteen eighties. Each team has a garage on a roundabout. The quests start piling up. A mantaur named Corcunda, the friend of Dong Quixote, is split in half, and one half is somewhere on this floor.
Heat two is a hail storm on the road. Two giant kangaroo bosses block it. The monsters can only be beaten with a trick. Carl ends up wearing a timed kangaroo costume, and when it runs out, it tries to take his skin with it. The team comes in seventh.
Then a note appears in Carl’s skill. It is from Akuma, the war mage leader, who says Carl must kill two teams in the next heat and then visit him. Rend dies in the safe room when Mordecai speaks, and he comes back stronger.
Chapters Twenty-Seven To Thirty-Two: Plenty Of Plenty
Carl and Donut are called to a live show on the ocean floor. The studio is full of caprid judges. Carl is told to exert himself, and he uses his question on live air. He asks whether the public knows the gods have escaped the dungeon, and that they should run.
The goat hosts panic. The studio erupts, and Lexis walks out covered in gore, saying the ratings are the highest ever.
Heat three is a race to a giant beetle skull, with Wall of Fire at level sixteen. Donut kills over ten thousand sugar hermits. Carl and Donut win the heat and put two teams out.
Chapters Thirty-Three To Fifty-One: Mercenaries And Murder
Eris, the goddess of chaos, kisses Carl and offers him a choice of boons. Carl and his friends then corner Akuma in a diner and beat him. He says he wanted Carl to kill two teams so the game would pit him against friends, and then Carl would have to help the war mages. Carl punches him.
Heat four is a jungle track, with piranhas that fly. In chapter forty four, team One Fine Pig’s armored vehicle runs over Carl’s three mercenaries on the street, Finley, Olga and Quemada. Carl storms into their garage in rage. Donut talks him down.
Carl and Donut win heat four. Team One Fine Pig is eliminated, and Carl takes their pig, Penelope, from the empty house. An interlude follows. A Syndicate officer sends an agent named Minus into the dungeon as a tourist, to stop the watching before it ends the galaxy. Minus is the brother of the fan named Linus, who has just been killed by Syndicate security.
Chapters Fifty-Two To Sixty-Seven: The Factory
Carl needs a way out for the crowds. The plan is a hidden guild called the Pineapple Cabaret. To get in, Carl has to perform a song at the Lollipop karaoke bar. Dwight the unicorn stabs the DJ, a brawl follows, and Donut’s try fails, so Carl says he will have to sing it himself. Li Na, the broken healer, is sent through first as a test. Later, a single flower blooms on a cactus, which is the signal that she made it and that the others can follow.
Heat five is a drug factory run by knockers, full of dolls and white powder. Corcunda’s two halves finally merge. The god Grull appears and makes four legged creatures stronger. Dong Quixote dies in this heat. Donut says it out loud, that he was her friend. Team Sparkles wins. Carl and Donut come in fourth, and the Lady Dominators are eliminated.
Chapters Sixty-Eight To Seventy-Three: The Big Plan
In the stables, Carl explains it. He has an Emberus problem. A smite is due unless a man named Hellik is dead by the end of the eleventh floor, and the plan means Carl leaves the party. Two hundred crawlers will try the Pineapple Cabaret, and fifteen hundred more must take deals, so fewer friends have to race each other.
At a goodbye party, Elle exposes Linus as an impostor, the brother of the real Linus. Elle sends her message out to the universe, and the scene ends with that alien leaving the dungeon. The cleaner bots carry crawlers away. Imani reports two hundred and twenty seven sent to the Pineapple Cabaret, not counting Li Na.
Chapters Seventy-Four To Eighty-Four: Six And Seven
Heats six and seven run in an apartment building, and the racers shrink. In heat six, Carl uses a hidden can to kill team Free Love, the bugbears he towed in chapter ten. He hates it, and he says so. Donut finishes second.
Then heat seven rules arrive. Three teams, only one survives. The groupings split friends, and the AI starts the first of nine Scolopendra attacks. It turns people into animals. Carl becomes a dog, Donut becomes huge, and Elle becomes a goblin.
Osvaldo tries to rush the exit, and Britney kills him. Carl blows the floors to open the way. Donut crushes a car that tries to run, and she earns three player killer skulls.
Chapters Eighty-Five To Eighty-Seven: The Casino
Carl’s group walks into the Desperado Club and its casino, a second way to move crawlers out of the playing field. A croupier named Mitch asks a hundred thousand gold for the next group, and then the tables, chairs and guards all turn into mimics. Donut spots it a second early. They win the fight, and the casino sends crawlers on. An interlude shows Quasar counting two hundred and three people on the eleventh floor, and a hundred seventy two deals taken.
Chapters Eighty-Eight To Ninety-Eight: The Parade
Twenty three crawlers enter the eleventh floor. Carl leaves the party, Donut picks the Elite Gurkha Warrior class, and Chaco, a former crawler, is named Grand Master of the parade. Everyone has ninety minutes to build floats.
The parade runs down a yellow brick road lined with masked figures called horribles. The book says they are memories, left over from a people who once existed. Chaco’s wings are ripped off during the broadcast, and the AI takes over the fleshmancer Grigori to explain.
At the arena, Carl uses his first choice on Scolopendra, the final boss of the dungeon. The AI warns that killing her, or leaving her behind, sets off her remaining attacks. The plan uses lightning, gods and a pig named Penny. A god named Emberus is killed, and a banger sphere with the wrong pet biscuit turns Scolopendra into a puddle, and then into a level one crawler on Carl’s side. Nineteen crawlers remain.
The Last Pages
Three interludes follow. Sydnee Iglacia, a historian, talks on air about the crisis. Prime Minister Victory watches from her bunker as the twelfth floor begins. And Louis wakes up in Sheol on the fifteenth floor, with Britney, Pontiff and a demon named Forkith.
Book nine is the next in the series. I have not read it, so that is all I will say. If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me below: which part hit you hardest, Dong in the factory or the finale in the arena?
