Published: May 12, 2026
Publisher: Ace
Series: Dungeon Crawler Carl #8
Genre: Fantasy, LitRPG
Pages: 704 (Hardcover)
My Rating: 3.5 Stars
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Synopsis:
It’s off to the races in the explosive eighth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
As chaos and mass panic spread outside the dungeon in the wake of Faction Wars, Carl and Donut find themselves on the tenth floor, where they’re forced to compete in a surprisingly normal set of tasks. Well, normal for the dungeon.
Races. Get from point A to point B, and don’t come in last. After each race, they pick an upgrade for their vehicle and the track gets more challenging. It all seems a little too normal, a little too simple.
Ignore those strange glitches that are occurring with increasing frequency. Don’t listen to those whispers about what’s happening on the mysterious eleventh floor, something the system AI calls A Parade of Horribles. Nobody, not even the showrunners, knows what that means. Just that the AI has ominously dubbed it “a coming-out party for the ages.”
Everything is fine, Crawler. I repeat, everything is fine.
Carl hates that it’s business as usual. The rules of this floor have taken away his agency. That just will not do.
So Carl is planning a party of his own. It’s a plan so dangerous, so insane, he can’t even consult his friends lest the AI put a stop to it. Because if it goes wrong, it’s not just the end of Carl and Donut. No. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
I’ve been excited to get back to the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl since finishing up This Inevitable Ruin. A Parade of Horribles was a respectable return to this wild, wild dungeon world and certainly brought the heat, literally. Now, personally, this wasn’t my favorite installment because much like the third book with the trains, racing inspired stuff just isn’t really my thing. It was a fun idea and I think it would work super well for the rumored tv series, and might have been awesome in the audio version. Racing cars just… really aren’t my thing.
The races are chaotic and there are multiple heats, where crawlers must face off against NPC teams until they are slowly whittled down to a final few. All the while Carl and Donut are frantically plotting to save as many crawlers as they possibly can while also completing the dungeon AI’s ridiculous and difficult side quests. Thanks to the rules of this floor, like limited access to safe rooms, strict time limits between and during the race heats, and the fact that the same driver can’t drive consecutive heats, Carl and Donut have to get creative with their plotting. Oh, and Mordecai has morphed into some sort of reaper and keeps randomly spewing prophetic musings.
I find that I don’t actually have too much to say about this book other than it just didn’t quite work for me as well as the last few have. I think if you’re a fan of racing media you might really enjoy this and I appreciated how creative some of the different tracks were. It’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, so things are over the top, ridiculous, and straight up uncouth at times which is part of the fun. I seem to be in the minority in terms of my middling enjoyment. I did like the extremely climactic ending portion because A Parade of Horribles does cover TWO dungeon floors instead of just one! Overall, it was a fairly solid installment and I look forward to seeing where things go next.
Powder & Page 
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