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I love the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I’ve been looking for something else to scratch the itch as I’m waiting for the next book of DCC to come out in May. I was offered an advanced copy, but then I totally dropped the ball when I got distracted with my new chickens. This was released several weeks ago, and if you haven’t picked it up yet — here’s your sign to do so!
This book opens with a character who’s suffering from a terminal condition – he’s allergic to magic. That’s a big problem. This is not a character who has lived a long life and is accepting their death. This is a young person who’s going to die early, and although he’s running out of options, he hasn’t totally given up yet. He’s been living like a recluse for years; he can’t leave the house because there’s too much magic outside. He wears lead gloves and has barricaded his house as best he can to try to extend his lifespan. As a result, he’s lived most of his adult life locked away in his apartment, making money by placing bets on a game show called Mana Runners. Then this dude pops into his life and is like, ” Hey, would you like a cure?” He knows this has to be a trap somehow… but what is there to lose if you’re already terminal? So, turns out a lot can be lost even if you’re already terminal. Turns out this dude offering a magic cure was actually a lich, and the lich had intended on taking over his body….but spell goes wrong due to the MC’s magic repellent nature. He was supposed to be possessed by the lich, and while he’s still in control of himself, he’s bound to a sarcastic, verbally abusive talking skull that only he can see. For bonus points, now he has to murder someone every day in order not to die. Because of the spell and his bond with the lich, he’s qualified as a lich, and because of that, he has to murder a sentient creature every 24 hours, or he’ll die for real.
To get around being a mass murderer, our brave MC decides to throw himself into the Mana Runners game show, where he kills sentient monsters, which count as sentient beings, therefore escaping having to murder fellow “people” for his continued existence.
This is fast-paced, fun, and despite the lichyness of it all, it’s an upbeat adventure rather than a grimdark trauma fest. As is normal for Rachel Aaron, we’ve got a group of strong personalities in a found family group of misfits.
There are some similarities to DCC in that the MC is competing in a televised event where the audience tends to make bets on who wins/survives. However, this is supposed to be a voluntary thing rather than forced slavery like in DCC. In fact, the MC has been a huge fan of the show for decades and spent a lot of time analyzing stats to make bets. Since this is a televised event, there are cameras that watch your every move, and if you do enough amusing or clever things, you can become a “fan favorite” just like in DCC. The number of people watching you and the number of fans you have do affect how the players interact with each other. The MC thinks that all the players should be cooperative and work together to beat the dungeon, but some Runners feel like merking a fellow Runner and looting them is just a part of the game. As per normal with Rachel Aaron, the characters are all essentially “good guys” who just want everyone to be nice and cooperative, sometimes to the point of their own peril. Crawlers in the DCC series have a much, much more brutal time of things, generally speaking, and so you can think of Death Has Joined The Party as a toned-down version if you’re looking for something fun but with less horrifying deaths. That’s not to say folks don’t die here, it’s just not as frequent or descriptive.
I think Mim was my favorite character, since she’s a dungeon monster, she’s learning how humans behave, so she can pretend to be a mana runner. She wants to leave the dungeon, but what she’s doing is forbidden; monsters aren’t allowed to leave the dungeon. So here she is, on camera for the world to see, and she needs to pass for a human. She has no idea where the boundaries are for social norms, and so she often gets it hilariously wrong. She’s unintentionally very funny.
This was a pretty long book, so if I were going to have a criticism, it’d be that it was a touch longer than it needed to be and could have been edited down a bit by removing some of the repeated information. That said, I have no major complaints and had a really good time with this book. If you’re looking to scratch your Dungeon Crawler Carl itch, this could be for you!