Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Sequels can be a tricky thing, and second books in longer series are perhaps the trickiest. They have to honour what worked in book one while doing enough that is new to justify their existence, and they have to do all of this while leaving enough for later books to explore. Carl's Doomsday Scenario, the second book in Matt Dinniman's now genuinely enormous Dungeon Crawler Carl series, has to do all of that and also navigate the awkward gear-change from training-wheels apocalypse to the real thing. To my mind, it manages all three, even if it does so a little less smoothly than its predecessor.

If you haven't read book one, you should probably read it first (and, of course, my review of it), because Carl's Doomsday Scenario picks up so directly from where its predecessor stopped that there is no real on-ramp here. Carl and Princess Donut are about to descend to the third floor of the dungeon, and the book opens, more or less, with them stepping into it. "Welcome, Crawler, to the third floor. The previous level will collapse in three hours and thirty-five minutes." If that line makes you grin, you are in the right place. If it makes you wince, this is not the book that will change your mind.

The structural conceit of the third floor is the thing that gives the book its shape, and it is also the thing that gives Dinniman the room to grow. The third, sixth, ninth, and so on floors are unique in the dungeon. Rather than being something new every season, they are essentially the same every time: a multi-floor storyline about a beast that sleeps beneath a volcano and once unleashed an apocalypse. What this means in practical terms is that the third floor, called the Over City, an artificial sky over a wooden-planked floor with hundreds of small scattered villages surrounded by wide swaths of abandoned city, plays as an open-world expansion after the comparatively linear opening levels. Every three levels in this dungeon, the setting shifts into more of an open-world format; picture an MMORPG environment with sprawling cities, NPCs living out storylines, quest givers, other players running around, and so on. If you have ever played the jump from a tutorial zone into a properly populated MMO city, you will recognise the shape of this exactly.

Two big mechanical additions arrive with the new floor. The first is that crawlers must now specialise by selecting a race and a class, choices that shape their abilities, strengths and strategies going forward. The second is quests. Both of these are good news for the book, and both come with hazards. 

The race and class decisions are the sort of nerd-bait that the genre demands, and Dinniman delivers with considerable wit. I'm not going to spoil the selection for you, but they are interesting choices, and I'm not sure ones I would have made in the same situation (or more likely in a real tabletop RPG). 

Quests are the riskier addition. This new layer of storytelling opens up so many doors of imaginative questlines, but the plot of this book is, on the surface, as straightforward as the previous instalment: Carl and Donut enter the new floor, level up, fight bosses, collect gear and move on. What quests do, when they work, is give the floor a sense of being inhabited rather than simply traversed. NPCs become people with their own grievances, settlements become places, and the dungeon stops feeling like a corridor of set pieces and starts feeling like a world. When they do not work, they slow the book down, and there are stretches of Carl's Doomsday Scenario where the forward momentum that made the first book so propulsive does indeed sag a little under the weight of side activity. The most coherent critical reading I have seen of this book is that it feels like a filler arc in places, and I would not entirely defend the book against that charge. There is too much in here for filler, but the pacing is genuinely uneven in a way that book one was not.

What carries you through, as before, is the cast. Mordecai, the crawlers' guildmaster, gets a proper expansion of his role here; he can now leave his guildhall, and a great deal of the third floor's tone, that mixture of weary corporate enabling and grudging affection, sits on his shoulders. His new Over City form is an incubus, level fifty, and Donut's reaction to it is exactly the sort of thing the book exists for. Mongo, Donut's velociraptor, is the new running gag, and the book is wise enough to play him as a genuine animal companion rather than a comedy prop. Carl and Donut continue to be the engine, and the engine continues to purr; their dynamic deepens in this book, with Donut showing flashes of something more than vanity and Carl edging cautiously toward acknowledging that he is now responsible for, and devoted to, a household. There is a beat about two-thirds of the way through where Carl, exhausted, looks at the sleeping cat and dinosaur and thinks of them as his family. It is the sort of line that should not work in a book with this much explosive comedy in it, and it absolutely does.

Tonally, Carl's Doomsday Scenario is also where Dinniman starts to test how dark his series is prepared to go, and the answer is darker than you might think. The book touches on neglect, sex work, abuse, trauma, gaslighting and abandonment. They are not forced; they are interwoven into the story very well, and they don't detract from the comedy, nor does the comedy downplay these subjects. The murdered-women-falling-from-the-sky storyline, which sounds glib in summary, is handled with more care than you would expect, and there is a thread about trafficking that the book takes seriously even as the broader narrative is still cracking jokes about goat-themed hellspawn and the latest patch notes. Whether you find that mix harmonious or jarring is going to be a matter of personal taste; for me, it more or less works, partly because the book is so explicit that the violence of the dungeon is meant to be appalling and partly because Dinniman is genuinely interested in what happens to ordinary people in inhuman systems. The thread of dignity I noted in the first book is still here, and it has, if anything, been sharpened.

There is also, woven through the talk-show sequences that book one introduced and book two leans into harder, a streak of political anger that I had not quite seen coming. Carl uses an interview to make an inflammatory statement against the Skull Empire, a galactic monarchy whose citizens watch the dungeon as entertainment, supporting a rebellion primarily to antagonise the king. The book is, quietly and consistently, on the side of the people being chewed up by the machine and against the people doing the chewing, and it is willing to articulate that position directly. For a series whose tonal default is goblin merchants and exploding compensation perks, this is a more interesting place to be than I would have predicted.

A few smaller notes for the record. The title refers to a bomb item that Carl creates in-story, called Carl's Doomsday Scenario, which is exactly the sort of detail the series traffics in. The Ace hardcover edition, released in September 2024, includes the second part of an exclusive three-part short story called Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret, which is a nice bonus if you are reading the new editions rather than the originals. The audiobook continues to be exceptional; Jeff Hays seems somehow to have more characters to play with here, and the book gives him plenty of room to show off.

So, where does that leave us? Carl's Doomsday Scenario is not, I think, quite the equal of its predecessor. The freshness has, by definition, gone; the open-world structure of the third floor pulls some of the tightness out of the pacing, and a few of the new mechanical layers take a book to bed in. What it does have is the same generous, ferocious, surprisingly humane spirit that made the first book such a pleasure, and it pushes that spirit into deeper and slightly more uncomfortable territory without losing its sense of humour about itself.

If you finished Dungeon Crawler Carl and wondered whether the series had enough fuel for the long haul, this is the book that answers that question. It does, and then some. I will be reading on, and I suspect most of you will too.