Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning. This is a full recap of The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, by Matt Dinniman, book three of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It gives away everything, the ending included, and the book has heavy swearing and gore. If you haven’t read it, come back after. If book four is next and book three has gone fuzzy, stay.
Here is the short answer. The whole book happens on the fourth floor, a subway system called the Iron Tangle. Carl and Donut get a secret book, steal a train, and lose a rival, a woman named Hekla, to Katia. At the end, a summoned war god splits a monster in half.
I grouped the thirty-four chapters and the epilogue into stops, and every number comes from the text.
Chapters One To Four: The Iron Tangle
The book opens on a moving train. Carl, Donut, their dinosaur Mongo and Katia arrive on the fourth floor, called the Iron Tangle. Katia says the car looks like a Moscow metro car. There are ten days on the clock, and the floor hides nine thousand, three hundred seventy-five stairwells.
In chapter two they reach station eighty-three, and the safe room is a fast food place with a bopca named Wendita. Mordecai now looks like a toad, a Grulke, level fifty. Three hundred eighty-nine thousand, four hundred forty-one crawlers are left.
They spend fifteen thousand gold on a personal space, a shared home with a training room and a crafting studio. In chapter three a message arrives from a dead friend. Brandon, a crawler Carl helped, has been killed. Carl goes to the training room and does not stop.
In chapter four he builds his first crafted items. The achievement is called Martha Stewart.
Chapters Five To Nine: Chaco And The Cookbook
In chapter five Carl forges door blocks to seal train cars. The Yellow Line reward room hands out prize suitcases. Carl’s holds an invisibility potion. Donut’s is a trap, and a swarm of fire ants pours out in the conductor’s bar. Vernon, the conductor, burns, and the team escapes onto the platform at the last second.
Chapter six, Banshee Station, brings a message from Zev, their publicist. She says Katia is boring, and that Carl needs to make her more interesting. Carl and Donut also scrap two big robots for about fifteen tons of metal.
Chapter seven is the turn. At station one hundred thirty-one, Mongo reaches level fifteen. Then Carl opens a fan box, and a wolf-headed host named Chaco arrives with the Prize Carousel. Mordecai lashes out at him and is thrown into a seven-day time out. Carl picks the book on the carousel, and it is The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook.
In chapter eight we learn what it is. It is a hidden book, passed from crawler to crawler, with notes from earlier owners. The price of access is passing your own knowledge on. Imani turns up at the Desperado Club, and then Donut kills a crawler named Ji-Hoon in the club, and gets a skull over her head. In chapter nine, at the club’s wheel of fortune, Carl gets an upgrade for his toe ring that boosts his strength.
Chapters Ten To Fourteen: Derail The Train
Katia learns to copy Hekla, a top ten crawler. Donut gets a saddle for Mongo. Carl sets landmines on a platform, and in chapter eleven he derails a train. The achievement is called Locomotive Breath, he reaches level twenty-nine, and a sponsor arrives, the Valtay Corporation.
In chapter twelve Donut gets a sponsor too, Princess D’nadia. On a named train, the Dismemberment Limited, the team beheads a war mage called Dismember, who Carl guesses was building an army from crawlers’ bones. In chapter thirteen Carl finds he can look through portals.
Then comes the plan. In chapter fourteen Carl takes over the Nightmare Express, a named steam train, and drives it himself, while Donut rides Mongo down the tracks to scout. Its fire-woman is Fire Brandy, a lesser demon who keeps having children.
Chapters Fifteen To Eighteen: The Abyss
Chapter fifteen shows what the trains are for. Carl climbs to a burning pit called the Abyss. Trains burst from portals above it and fall in. Only the engine car goes home, and the rest is thrown away like garbage.
In chapter sixteen Elle and Imani message about a secret tunnel. Carl and Fire Brandy talk about children while the train waits. In chapter seventeen the team enters Yard E, full of zombie creatures, and meets an NPC named Madison.
Chapter eighteen warns that a station called Terminus eats people, and Bautista is stuck there with about four hundred of them. Carl asks Madison who the Kravyad are, and finally leaves her behind.
Chapters Nineteen To Twenty-Four: Hekla
In chapter nineteen Carl meets Frank in a bar and takes a ring from him. In chapter twenty, the team tapes an episode in a submarine, and when they come out their home is full of women. They are Brynhild’s Daughters, Hekla’s group.
Chapters twenty-one to twenty-three are the knot. Hekla is at level thirty-three. Katia becomes the front of a train, a plow against the ghouls, and the text shows Hekla shooting her with invisible bolts. Katia wakes and uses her Rush skill on Hekla’s friend Eva, but veers off and kills Hekla instead. The text has Katia jump from level twenty-four to thirty-seven and claim a bounty of five hundred thousand gold.
In chapter twenty-four Donut turns the body into a minion so they can grab the key, and Carl drives the train away with a thousand crawlers on board.
Chapters Twenty-Five To Thirty: Growler Gary And The Hats
In chapter twenty-five Zev warns that a representative named Loita wants their account. In chapter twenty-six a gnoll bartender named Growler Gary keeps returning from the dead, so they kill him again and again, to collect his hands for the carts. Chapter twenty-seven is where Carl finds Krakaren clones at station twenty-four.
Chapter twenty-eight sends a rescue cart down the Mindaro line, and the stranded crawlers give Donut their hats. Chapter twenty-nine ends with Mordecai back, and Katia spraying the room with blood.
Chapters Thirty-One To Thirty-Two: Soul Crystals
In chapter thirty-one Carl works out that the ghoul generators run on soul crystals, and too many deaths at once can make them pop. Carl has an idea. Mordecai answers with one word, no.
In chapter thirty-two the timer is at seventeen hours, and the stairs open in eleven. The team punches a mantaur until the war god Grull is summoned from him, and Carl is pulled through the portal.
Chapters Thirty-Three And Thirty-Four: The Death Challenge
Chapter thirty-three is the climax. Carl lands in Trainyard E, next to a level ninety Mimic Rex. An announcer calls it a Death Challenge. Grull rises from the broken mantaur at level two hundred fifty, and his sponsor is Prince Maestro of the Skull Empire, who is alive and steering the god.
Carl drinks an invisibility potion and then Mordecai’s special brew, which keeps him almost invulnerable for thirty seconds while a god walks over him. Grull swings his axe and splits the Mimic Rex in half.
Katia disguises herself as Carl to pull the god away, and Elle flies a decoy run. Donut and Mongo, Li Jun and Li Na come through the portal. Li Na has chained the second mantaur, and they throw him through the portal with one second left. Grull whiffs away.
In chapter thirty-four Fire Brandy and Tizquick stay with the Nightmare as it is sent into the Abyss and blows up. Carl reaches level forty-one, and the stairs at station thirty-six open. Agatha and her shopping cart walk past, and Loita’s message waits below.
Epilogue
Back in the studio, Loita tells Carl that Zev is on a temporary reeducation retreat. Loita is now his public relations agent. Odette says the odds on Carl’s survival were fifty to one.
Before Book Four
The next book is The Gate of the Feral Gods. I have a recap of that one too. If this helped, subscribe, and tell me below which scene you liked most, the Nightmare heist or the Death Challenge.
