Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning. This is a full recap of The Butcher’s Masquerade, by Matt Dinniman, book five of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It gives away everything, the ending included, and the book has heavy swearing, gore and some very dark moments. If you haven’t read it, come back after. If book six is next and book five has gone fuzzy, stay.
Quick note, because people search for Dungeon Crawler Carl book four and land here. Book four is The Gate of the Feral Gods. This is the one after it.
Here is the short answer. The whole book happens on the sixth floor, a jungle called the Hunting Grounds, where rich aliens pay to hunt crawlers. Carl, a cat and a raptor take on the hunters, lose a friend to the sun, and walk into a party that is really a trap. Then a queen dies, and the floor falls away.
I grouped the seventy-five chapters and the epilogue into stops, and every number comes from the text.
Chapters One To Six: The Hunters
The book opens with a status screen. Seventeen days until the floor collapses, and thirty hours until the hunt begins. Carl is ranked first, with a bounty of three million gold. Eighty-five thousand crawlers are left, and three hundred sixty hunters wait in the city of Zockau.
In chapter one a liaison named Orren has a problem. Carl holds the pieces of the Gate of the Feral Gods, and the system cannot take them without killing the whole floor. Carl says the magic words, I want a lawyer. His attorney Quasar trades the gate for a receipt, four cretin bodyguards and a new Mercenary room. Carl then picks his specialty, Agent Provocateur, a bomb maker. He is level forty-seven.
Chapter two is a lesson. Night weasels paralyze him in the rain. Donut and Mongo save him, and Mordecai shows up in a new body, a fuzzy Pocket Kuma that cannot reach a doorknob.
Chapter five is the first strike. Carl hits Zockau early, blowing up the Desperado Club entrance and killing hunters, including Xindy, the little sister of a mantis named Vrah. An invisible crossbow shot drops him, and crawlers carry him away.
How Floor Six Works
Now the rules. Hunters start at level fifty, and a floor-wide timer ticks. Every hunter killed leaves a hand, called a trophy. Each trophy opens a gold Hunter Killer box, and the hands buy prizes at the end of the floor.
By chapter eight Carl holds thirty-four boxes. They pay five hundred ninety-five thousand gold. A Platinum box raises his Fear spell five levels, and he gains a spiderweb tattoo.
The big event is the Butcher’s Masquerade. The top fifty crawlers get invitations to a party at the high elf castle, with a plus-one each. The seventh floor waits at the end.
Chapters Seven To Twelve: Point Mongo
Carl plans a huge wheeled bomb, but the hunters are loose in thirteen hours. He leaves the bomb behind. In chapter ten he pays a bear mayor named Elmer to arrange an execution, and Donut shoves him off a slope. Carl and Donut now own the town. Donut renames it Point Mongo.
A quest called The Recital sends them to a clearing of female raptors. Their leader, Kiwi, level sixty, one-eyed and scarred, mates with Mongo instead of fighting. Donut is horrified, since she is basically his mother.
The chapter twelve achievement is Double-Billed. It means a second program, with elites, is also hunting him.
Chapters Thirteen To Nineteen: Signet And Beatrice
The elites arrive. Tsarina Signet, level sixty, half naiad and half high elf, wants to take the Naiad fort Fort Freedom. She is back from book two. The quest is Vengeance Of The Daughter, part one.
A talking sex doll head named Samantha, who claims to be a god, screams in their training room. Then comes chapter seventeen, and a visit to Odette in a storm. Carl and Donut sit through an interview, and Odette makes an announcement. Beatrice, Donut’s old owner, is alive.
Beatrice is thin, drugged and a hologram. Donut tells her that Carl is her person now. A sponsor is lost, and the Valtay take fifty-one percent of Borant.
Chapters Twenty To Thirty: Fort Freedom
The hunters keep coming. Carl builds a poison trebuchet from Dream elves’ gear. He straps seeking missiles to Samantha’s head and hurls her at a pair of elves. He kills a captured hunter, and his Ring of Divine Suffering grows. He reaches level fifty-five.
At Fort Freedom a lightning-spitting river boss swallows Holger. It is Claude Sludgington the Fourth, level sixty-five. Miss Nadine, a giant caterpillar who was once a teacher, dies in the fight. Samantha tells Carl, with gore on her face, that she said she would kill it. Part one is complete, and part two is a promise to kill Queen Imogen, Signet’s half-sister, at the party.
Edgar the tortoise tattoos Nadine onto Signet’s thigh as a memory. Then Zev says they must go.
Chapters Thirty-One To Thirty-Eight: The Convention
Carl is pulled off the floor for a fan convention called CrawlCon. He judges a children’s drawing contest, then walks into a panel moderated by Circe Took, Xindy’s mother. He bores her out of the room. The panel is a setup, and a gnoll guard’s vape smoke is a drug.
Back on the floor, Lucia Mar has wrecked the safe room in Alucarda. Carl uses a plan with clockwork decoys. Vrah gets Lucia’s ambush instead, and Carl drives an arrow of Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea into her. Her carapace burns and she flies off.
In chapter thirty-six Carl opens over thirty achievements and sews on patches. His Strength passes one hundred, and he picks the Swole perk. Meanwhile Donut kills one of Lucia’s dogs with a hole.
Chapters Thirty-Nine To Forty-Eight: Miriam
Carl signs autographs with the Popov brothers, takes a new sponsor, the Plenty, and stabs a reporter in the neck with a Sharpie.
Then comes a vampire plague. Big Tina, a dinosaur in a pink boa, bites Miriam Dom, and spreads vampirism across the floor. In chapter forty-seven Carl finds Miriam and Prepotente, called Pony, paralyzed in a clearing. Miriam is the source of the plague, and if she dies, all of it is cured. She asks Carl to wait for sunrise.
At dawn Miriam turns to dust leaning on Pony. In my reading, it is the saddest chapter in the book.
Chapters Forty-Nine To Fifty-Seven: The Creeping Apocalypse
Miriam’s death opens a new world quest, The Creeping Apocalypse. Fifty Odious Creepers must be killed before sunset. Donut charms Kiwi with a potion made from Mongo’s blood, and the raptors stop being a threat.
In chapter fifty-one a high elf procession arrives with a messenger for Queen Imogen. Carl is invited to dance with the queen at the Masquerade. A bolt of lightning knocks Donut out, and she says she saw her first love, a cat named Ferdinand, in the litter.
The crawlers kill most of the creepers but fail, and a thorn wall called the Gehenna Bramble starts spreading across the floor. Big Tina arrives, an allosaurus in a tutu. Carl kills a hunter named Iota, and his ring now gives four stat points per kill.
At the stairwell Signet warns that the dryads are summoning a god named Diwata. Carl pierces his nipple to wear a ring from Iota, and talks Donut into one too.
Chapters Fifty-Eight To Sixty-Two: Getting Ready
A flashback shows Quasar explaining the Zerzura spell. At the end of the floor it moves a whole town down. Carl wants it for the changelings, the shapeshifting kids stuck in the Desperado Club. Donut talks the crocodile bouncer into a secret route, but the club’s assistant manager Astrid sets Carl’s blood to boil.
Carl and Katia’s groups raid a hunter camp. A tree god, Diwata, is sponsored by Circe, and marks Carl for death. Carl writes a secret plan with six objectives. Number one is solving the Tina quest by dancing on stage. Number six is that no hunter leaves the floor alive.
Chapters Sixty-Three To Seventy: The Masquerade
The Masquerade is a trap. Timers count down to one hour, and Carl rides to the castle in a wagon with Britney. Imogen is a country boss, level one hundred forty-five. She tells the story of the party, a ritual that grants a boon only if the night ends without violence.
Vrah arrives with threats. Britney, a crawler with a patch jacket, pulls a tag on a butterfly that drains her warning light. Eva appears, and Katia lunges at her. Then the guest list changes. Signet walks in, invited by the goddess Apito herself.
The prize counter sells goods for hunter hands. Carl has sixty-six hunter hands. Mongo moonwalks in the pet contest. Lucia Mar cries for her mother in another voice, because the real children are inside her head. Donut charms Ferdinand with a cat’s blood potion and the room is sealed.
Chapters Seventy-One To Seventy-Five: The Recital
Carl learns that Gideon and his team, nearly thirty crawlers, are dead. Donut sings All Eyes On Me, a song her mother Bea once sang, and the song is a mass charm. Big Tina steps on stage, and thirty raptors in sea costumes drop a mainsail backdrop. Signet gives Carl a knife, says goodbye, and cuts her own throat beside Imogen. The seal breaks, and the Masquerade fails.
Donut cries sic em. The raptors attack the hunters. Vrah dies. Carl receives Signet’s mother as a golem to store in his inventory. Donut gives Kiwi the potion, I Take It All Back, which turns her into a bear. Tina says one word, Mom. The Recital is complete.
The Sledge finishes his spell and the castle drops to the ninth floor. In a cage fight with the AI, Imogen, Circe and the hunters fall. The Popov brothers seem dead, and Zabit is killed by his own traps. Carl wakes at level sixty-three with about fifteen crawlers left. He tells a crying Donut to wear her mask until it is safe.
Epilogue: The Great Race
The seventh floor is the Great Race. Prepotente leaves the party after smashing a glass wall. Donut becomes a Viper Queen. Elsewhere Katia kills Eva, and as Eva dies, she throws the Crown of the Sepsis Whore onto Katia. Now only one of Donut or Katia can take the stairs from the ninth floor to the tenth.
Before Book Six
Book six is The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. I have not read it, so that is all I will say. As of November twenty twenty-six there are eight books, according to reports.
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