The Butcher’s Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl #5) by Matt Dinniman

Format: Audio (Audible)
Read: 2026

I have now grown tired of these books.

They were fun to begin with, and I thought after the first one there was some potential for some satire on exploitative entertainment and hyper-capitalism; I had hope that the characters would grow and there could maybe develop some more sophisticated social commentary…. 4 books later I realised that was wishful thinking on my part. I find myself at that point in a series where the entertainment value has been worn thin by too much repetition, and I’m left focusing on the flaws (also see The Rivers of London).

For a start, this book is just over 700 pages in print or over 23 hours in audio format. That’s 200 pages longer than the fourth book. Now I have a belief that no book is ever improved by being over 500 pages long; honestly, the number of books I’ve loved that are longer than that must be a short list (which I am very interested to work out actually!). The longer a book is, the more likely it’s got stuffed with filler that would be better edited out (the same applies to long series), and there is just too much going on here – we have the standard storyline of how to survive the level while also dealing with Hunters, a side plot with that Signet TV show Carl got them involved with in the second book, a side plot with Tina the big dinosaur, Carl being pulled out to go to an IRL fan convention where he antagonises another powerful alien family that spills into the dungeon, he now has a lawyer where he’s got a another scheme cooking, Katia has split into her own party and whats going on there, and whats going on with Lucia Mar? I think there are also at least 50 other plot points.

There is so much going on at such a pace that it all just blows past me, and I also know by this point that I don’t need to pay attention because nothing really matters anyway. Carl will have some hidden-from-the-reader plan – usually with a last-minute deus ex machina – which will in some way go wrong, but it’s fine because all the important characters will survive.

I am now sick of Carl’s “cheating.” He has an unfair advantage because the AI has a fetish for his feet (and yes, I know the whole game is unfair!), he has the cookbook full of extra information, and he gets a lot of special treatment by the dungeon admins and gets out of trouble even when they do pull him into the office. It started to remind me of how I can’t stand Harry Potter because he never gets punished for breaking the rules, all the teachers give him special treatment, and at the end Dumblerdoor always rewards Griffyndoor enough points that they win the house cup, fuck all the other houses. I would hate Harry if I were a fellow student. Like, what makes this guy so special?

After 5 books, now it is repetitive and boring, and I never believe Carl is in any real danger. (Which I guess is what some readers like about this series; I hear it’s popular with the TikTok Romantasy crowd…)

I’ve read through some Goodreads reviews and social media comments on this series and see people praising the “character development” … and I question this: where? What character development? Yes, characters literally level up their skills inside the game and have changed races (in-game race, like into a tiger man or an ice creature), but character growth is pretty scant. Some have gotten more fleshed out beyond the previous attributes of a name and physical description, but nothing really surprising has happened. Jeff Hays, the narrator, has always done the heavy lifting in characterisation (again much like with Rivers of London and the amazing Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). The only character who has really changed is Katia – who started shy and awkward and now has her own team – but all that has happened in the background and almost entirely off-page; we’ve only seen it from Carl’s POV, where he very literally says things like ‘Katia has changed so much from the small quiet woman we met on level 3.” She was shy, and now I know she is clever and strong.

I also started to get more bothered by the literally repetitive writing, which is just sloppy and makes the whole book feel like a first draft (at the pace he publishes these, they actually might be). I have noticed this in earlier books; it’s not a new feature, I just can’t overlook it any more. There was a bit where a character is introduced, and Carl says she smells. Two sentences later, it is again stated that she smells, using the same phrasing. I have this on audio, so I can’t quote it exactly, but that is just one example of many. That one was the straw that broke this camel’s back, though! I remember I was doing the ironing when I listened to that bit, and it was then that I decided I needed to get a refund on the rest of the series.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is all surface level; it’s populated with flat cartoon characters and its “social commentary” is no more than pointing at a thing and saying ‘that’s bad’ without any real interrogation, and its gestures towards emotional moments are always cheap and unsatisfying. This book opens with Carl and Donut meeting Beatrice (Carl’s ex-girlfriend and Donut’s owner) which you’d think would be an emotionally engaging moment, and I while it may have been for Donut (who’s interior life we have no access to) Carl had barely any reaction to it, and it’s was a massive anti-climax after Bea’s possible return has been teased for 4 books. Bea herself was made no more real than the outline we’ve been slowly given through all Donut’s casual reminiscence of her cheating on Carl. It’s still extremely unclear how Carl even got together with Bea or what he saw in her.

So while this was entertaining for a bit, the novelty of this series has worn off five increasingly long novels later, and now I question why I ever liked it to begin with! I have to face up to the fact that this series is never going to answer the questions I want answered in a way I’ll find satisfying. It’s not what these books are.

I do own 1-5 audiobooks though, so I probably will re-read them in a couple of years when all memory has faded! I also might still listen to the sixth book because Audible wouldn’t let me refund it automatically (I think because I did 2 refunds on the same day, for books 7 and 8); I might be able to get them to if I contact customer support. But if I don’t get a refund sorted, maybe I’ll return to it when I feel in the right mood again… so you might get treated to reading another rant about the series’ flaws.

One good thing about reading this was it did get me over the line with reading 5 over 500-page books!