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MY ⭐️ RATING: 5/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Attention. Attention. The gates are down. The hunters are loose.
Run, Run, Run.
A lush jungle teeming with danger. Savage dinosaurs seeking blood. A fallen princess intent on vengeance. A mysterious, end-of-floor celebration for the top crawlers, dubbed “The Butcher’s Masquerade.”
The sixth floor. The Hunting Grounds.
As the remaining crawlers battle for their lives, a new, terrible threat looms. Outside tourists are finally allowed to enter the game, and they are here and ready to hunt. Among them is Vrah, a famed and veteran hunter, intent on collecting the biggest trophy of her career.
But their prey is far from harmless, and this season they are fighting back.
MY REVIEW
The Butcher’s Masquerade may be my favorite of the series so far. This felt much more like the series in the beginning where the focus was solely on the task at hand rather than everything else. This just felt right after what I felt was a step backwards in The Gate of the Feral Gods. Dinniman really went in on grounding this story and giving it some emotional balance that it really needed, and something I expected to happen soon, as I noted in my review of The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook.
Carl and Donut continue their dominance of the story and being some of the best characters in fantasy, today. With everything going on, now they deal with a lot of real-life consequences of their actions. It’s no longer just them, everything they do affects everyone. Among the old and new faces in the story, Quasar the lawyer is one of my favorites, he reminds me of Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul to a degree. He has a quirkiness and charm about him that perfectly mirrors Saul.
“Trauma does that, I thought. It’s an explosion with your heart at the center. It changes everything all at once.”
This newest level that our favorite characters face brings them to something that is a bit like The Most Dangerous Game meets Ocean’s Eleven with a splash of Jurassic Park, because the first two weren’t enough. Carl, Donut and the crew now have to face down people that are now in the game to hunt the crawlers while also having to survive to make it to a masquerade ball at the end, all while facing down with dinosaurs! Where this story gets even more interesting is the worked in heist story that Carl helps put into place that only takes the Carlness to another level. All this combined makes such a wild but touching story.
I’ll be honest and say I pretty much copied and pasted this from the previous review, because what else can I say? Jeff Hays put on another phenomenal performance, including signing as well as some guitar playing? It’s essentially a GraphicAudio at the point. I’ve said it three times and I’ll say it many more after this, “his narration takes what Dinniman makes great and puts it into the stratosphere of supremacy. It’s hard to compliment any further without sounding like a loon.” I’m proud of that, because it’s one-hundred percent truth. I’m amazed by all the different types of voices he can do without sounding like another one from male to female, god and demons. Just incredible work, the Dinniman/Hays pairing is perfection.
