Scott's Take: The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl series) by Matt Dinniman

 

The Gate of the Feral Gods is the fourth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman and continues the adventures of Princess Donut and Carl. In this adventure, the Princess Donut and friends must take down four castles in a row to escape this level.

 

They start in the desert in a little town being run by alien camels and being bombed by a bunch of airplane flying gnomes. They need to find a way to breach the flying castle in the sky to stop the bombings. If that is not bad enough, they also have the other castles to take down such as Necropolis, a submarine, and more. Obviously, some of those locations are not really castles, but they are classified as such for the game.

 

Carl and Donut also must work with the survivors assaulting the other castles. As nearly all the other survivors are pretty much idiots who have somehow still survived to this point, despite the fact that the AI clearly wants them dead, things are going to get harder for Carl and Donut.

 

This series remains fun and each book remains an action packed adventure with plenty of humor. There are things that happen in this book that should have major ramifications for the series. The print version still includes a bonus short story which I am still not sure what is the point of these characters yet.

 

This series is continued by the Butcher’s Masquerade which is book five in the series. I am currently reading this in eBook via the library. The crawlers have reached level six, The Hunting Grounds, so the space aliens who have been watching the show now can play as well. The space aliens that are now participating in the game have been classified as “Hunters” and have been assigned the mission to kill every crawler and their primary target is Carl. He has pissed off a lot of alien factions who have placed a bounty on his head. Can he survive this level?

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3Q6maU7

 

 

 

I read the print version of this book by way of a copy from the Polk-Wisdom Branch of the Dallas Public Library System.

 

 

Scott A. Tipple ©2026