Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning. This is a full recap of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, by Matt Dinniman, book six of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It gives away everything, the ending included, and the book has heavy swearing, gore and some very sad family scenes. If you haven’t read it, come back after. If book seven is next and book six has gone fuzzy, stay.
A quick note, because people search for Dungeon Crawler Carl book five and land here. Book five is The Butcher’s Masquerade. This is the one right after it.
Here is the short answer. The whole book is the eighth floor, a copy of Earth in December, and it is set in Cuba. Carl and Donut collect monster cards, take on a murder job in a demon club, watch a memory of Carl’s dying father, and finish with a demon prince, a goddess and a new tattoo of an eye.
I grouped the seventy-two chapters, the prologue and the epilogue into stops, and every number comes from the text.
The Prologue: An Old Plan
The prologue is a memory from Mordecai’s own season. Odette, now a show host, is helping his team escape a floor by killing a storm goddess named Dodola, whose sponsor is a rich alien called Huanxin. Their trick is a magic dart that forces a god to be summoned out of a person.
The person turns out to be a skyfowl named Uzzi, who is Mordecai’s brother. A bard on the team throws the dart. Uzzi dies, the goddess dies, and Mordecai swears to kill Odette. Keep that in your pocket, because it comes back.
Chapters One To Four: Welcome To Cuba
The book opens on the eighth floor, the Ghosts of Earth. Last book, Prepotente broke the seventh floor, so this one starts after a skip. Thirty-eight thousand, five hundred thirty-two crawlers are left, and it is December tenth.
Cascadia explains the floor. Each squad lands in a copy of a real place, and this is a memory. People are ghosts you walk through, but cars, onions and doors are real. For fourteen days nobody can leave their region. Each squad also gets six extra spots, and twenty flags. Stick a flag in a monster under five percent health and it becomes a card, a T’Ghee totem.
Carl and Donut picked Havana. Mordecai is now a pink Hills Cyclops. Donut takes the class Master Telephone Psychic. Carl’s loot includes a nipple ring, and a jacket patch that can make a key for any lock, but it costs a bone.
Chapters Five To Nine: Seals, Crabs And Cards
In chapter five they meet a squad of three. Paz Lo is a Santero. Anton Lopez is a tattooed player killer. Sister Ines Quiteria is a cat girl, and Donut hates her on sight. They do not trust Carl, because of Prepotente.
A quest called The Chowder War sets monk seals against red land crabs. To get a card, Carl helps Ines fight a monk seal. Then he flags a second seal, Geraldo. He is the first card in Carl’s deck.
Chapter eight ends with a lore book, and a monster Donut loves the name of. She is called the Bedlam Bride. In chapter nine they pay gold to practice card fights in a mock arena. A card battle has a deckmaster. Hit that one person and you win.
Chapters Ten To Seventeen: Gods In Havana
They enter a ghost town of dead spirits called Pueblo de los Olvidados. A boss walks into their saferoom and earns Carl an achievement called Interloper. In chapter twelve Carl and Donut visit a show called Shadow Boxer, hosted by a former crawler named Rosetta, while a goat liaison called Harbinger watches. She asks about Carl’s mother and father. It is hard to watch.
Back in the village, Carl fixes a shrine, and the god Ogun appears. Ogun is furious that his worshippers freed his sister, Yemaya. He crushes Anton’s head and burns Paz’s face, and Paz is left dying. Sister Ines panics and stabs Paz with a flag. Paz turns into a card.
Yemaya arrives, along with a second goddess, Eileithyia. Her real name is Huanxin Jinx. She gives Carl a quest to kill spiders, and a secret one.
Chapters Eighteen To Twenty-Four: The Crown And The Club
In chapter eighteen Carl joins Club Vanquisher, a temple club of Emberus, and meets the high cleric Pater Coal. Then Katia has to tell Donut a hard thing. Eva, as she died, put the Crown of the Sepsis Whore on Katia’s head. On the ninth floor only one of Katia and Donut can leave. The show wants them to fight.
Katia has a plan. Her prize box holds a flower from Eileithyia, which would give her one of three boons. Two give her a way out of the game, as a pregnant exile or as a palace attendant. The box has three seals, and two are already broken. The last one is an assassination job at a Guild of Suffering. The job’s rules say that speaking it aloud cancels it, so everyone talks around it.
Carl also visits a male strip club that is secretly a spider guild, and walks away with a map of the secret passages under the Desperado Club.
Chapters Twenty-Five To Thirty-Seven: Spider Card, Fairy Job
Carl flags a ninja crab named Raul with a crab trap, and he joins the deck. Then he goes to rescue Samantha, the sex doll head, and finds her in the web of Shi Maria. Shi Maria is a giant spider with a fifth eye that makes people blind or insane. Carl strikes a deal. If she helps him, he will get her to the city of Larracos, where she hopes to find her husband. He injures her just enough to turn her into a card.
Then comes the job. The Guild of Suffering is run by Astrid, a sprite. Carl and Katia kill her in a back room, and Carl rips off her wings. A demon named Minge is killed by vorpals. The club closes.
Odette announces on her show that she is going into the dungeon, sponsoring her own goddess. Carl has to pick a new adjutant, and he chooses Baroness Victory. Then everyone is teleported for phase two.
Chapters Thirty-Eight To Forty-Six: The Father
Phase two is a quick scavenger hunt. Carl and Donut land in Monroe County, Florida, with forty-six hours to get a key. Monsters with cards stand under streetlights, each holding a token. Beat them and you can climb a dirt mound, seven hundred feet up. At the top is a floating chunk of Iowa.
Here the show gets personal. In a trailer, Carl watches a recording of his father’s last day. His father is dying in a hospital bed. There is a six year old boy, Asher, and a young woman, Tami-Lynn. Carl has a half brother he never knew. Before the recording ends, his stepmother ends his father’s life, and Carl whispers that Asher will not be forgotten.
The trailer burns, and the boss is a stitched together hydra of faces from Carl’s life, including Asher and Tami-Lynn. Its deckmaster is Judge Lucian, an old man Donut already knows. Shi Maria bites off head after head, and her eye connects with Carl. Asher’s head says he wishes he had known him. The last head left, Tami-Lynn, says she has no regrets. The burning body falls apart, and the key drops from it.
Chapters Forty-Seven To Fifty-One: After Iowa
Back in the saferoom, there is a Christmas party. A liaison tries to seize a benefactor box from the Open Intellect Pacifist Network, but a Syndicate rule overrides him. Carl opens it alone.
He takes his father’s motorcycle north, to a homeless shelter that exists only as a memory. A man named Goff, called Paulie, left a message. His kind is hidden on Earth, and the message plays only when the AI is ready to hear it. The liaison, Orren, makes Carl trade for what he found.
Chapters Fifty-Two To Sixty-One: Back To Cuba
Chapters fifty-two and fifty-six flash back to Club Vanquisher, where Carl takes a loan of nine hundred ninety thousand gold from the Emberus temple for a ring. Then phase three begins. Carl is back in Cuba on December twenty-sixth. Only two of five squads hold keys.
Imani’s squad is dead, and she is hiding in a church, where Quan, a cheater from an earlier floor, has followed. Carl, Donut and Samantha ride his father’s bike to stop him. Quan dies, and Donut gets the credit, so both keys land with her. Then comes the cruel rule. A key can only change hands through a card battle, and the Capitol door is falling apart. Ren, the dog woman, cannot get one in time. She hands Carl her cards, and he swears he will make them suffer.
Meanwhile the war between seals and crabs has drawn Hell’s attention, and a Demon Eviction event dumps demons on Cuba. Sister Ines turns out to control the demon prince Amayon, who looks like a giant snake, and threatens the church.
Chapters Sixty-Two To Seventy-One: The Final Card Battle
Amayon, a prince of Sheol, is stuck in the body of a sea serpent. He needs a tithe of souls to go home, and every crawler in Cuba is on the menu. The quest is called Where the Sidewalk Ends. Carl’s plan is to give Amayon what he wants, but bigger.
Louis kills Sister Ines. That angers a goddess, Ysalte, who turns Ines’s corpse into her own body. She is level two hundred fifty, and she is invulnerable. The fight is a card battle on a skyscraper, with Amayon on offense and Ysalte on defense. Carl jumps off the building holding Samantha. Then Carl uses a trap on himself to drop under five percent health, which sets off fire that makes Amayon stronger. Katia uses a magic bolt on the goddess, and the kill goes to Paz’s card.
Then Shi Maria combines with Carl. She tattoos an eye on his chest. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.
Chapter Seventy-Two And The Epilogue: Faction Wars
Carl wakes up bald, with Mongo burned and missing a wing. Donut is level sixty-three, and Carl is seventy-three. She rips the card of Shi Maria, and she rips Paz’s card, too. Samantha leaves to go back to her king. Amayon casts his spell, and the world will be sucked into a portal. A countdown begins.
The crawler count has fallen from thirty-eight thousand, five hundred thirty-two to thirty-three thousand, eight hundred four. Carl and Donut use an emergency action to hand pending Faction Wars votes to the audience. Then they enter the stairwell early, and they are welcomed to Faction Wars.
The epilogue goes to Earth. An alien agent named Agatha waits in the cold for the season to start early. Elsewhere, Tipid and Rosetta bring a ship of fifty thousand former crawlers in to join the Princess Posse.
Before Book Seven
Book seven is the next in the series. I have not read it, so that is all I will say. This recap covers book six only, and the eye tattoo is the thing to remember.
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