Literature / The Gate Of The Feral Gods

"Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment." - Executed Prisoner John Spenkelink

"I'm going to assume right now that out of the hundred and fifty or so crawlers in this bubble, every single one of them is an incompetent idiot."

— Mordecai

The fifth floor brings with it new challenges: The crawlers are separated into "bubbles," miniature worlds each sectioned into a Land, Air, Sea, and Subterranean quadrant. Each quadrant has a castle, and all four castles must be taken before the bubble will pop and the stairwells open.

The problem is, everyone in the bubble with the Royal Court is an under-leveled idiot.

After some other crawlers ruin Carl's quest, they struggle to come up with a plan to take down a flying castle despite none of them having any flight ability. Meanwhile, Carl and Mordecai continue to argue over the Ring of Divine Suffering that Carl still has, and the new PR agent Loita is becoming more and more aggressive in her dealings with the Royal Court.

Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Gate of the Feral Gods is the fourth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. It covers the fifth floor of the Dungeon. The sequel is The Butcher's Masquerade.

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This novel provides examples of:

• An Arm and a Leg: At the end of the Orthrus arc, Carl inadvertently rips off Quan's arm when the man rockets away from an enraged Carl.
• The Alcoholic: We meet Louis and Firas drunk at a bar. They return absolutely wasted. Mordecai gives them potions that both forcibly sober them up and prevent them from drinking any more.
  Louis: It's all I got left.
• As You Know: A shocked and "outraged" Zev explains the results of Carl's and Katia's final plan to them in barely restrained glee, letting them know that the Party's brainwashing has not worked.
• Badass Boast: Carl, Donut, and Katia all get the option to worship Grull.
  Donut: Worship Grull? At this point, I’m quite sure it’s the other way around.
  • Carl delivers one to Borrant and the Bloom after he destroys the ninth floor and drowns the armies of the rich assholes playing a game with his life.
  Zev: There’ll be consequences.
  Carl: Probably. But tell them they approved this. We didn’t cheat. We used the tools they gave us. Also, say they’re gonna want to wait to see what happens next before they decide to, you know, accelerate me or throw me into the disposal unit or whatever. I know they’re in real danger of losing control of the season. Whomever ends up in control of the next floor is going to make a lot of money.
  Zev: What do you mean?
  Carl: Just watch.
  • Carl challenges the universe before heading to the sixth floor, holding up the ring of divine suffering.
  Carl: You guys see this thing? I’ll tell you what. If you want it, it’s yours. It’s right here. Come and get it, motherfuckers. Actually, you know what? I have a better idea. No need to come to me because I’ll be coming to you. That’s my pledge to you and to everyone else watching this. By the time the sixth floor collapses, every single hunter who dares to set foot on the same floor as us will be dead. This I swear on my life. One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.
• But Thou Must!: Carl suspects what's going to happen as soon as the AI "gifts" him the second watch down in the sub. He does everything he can to avoid it... but the game forces him to open the Gate of the Feral Gods if he wants to survive.
• Call-Back: Mordecai was a mycologist (mushroom studying guy) before he entered the dungeon, so when Donut asks "What eats mushrooms?" he can quickly respond "Lots of things.".
• Cool Old Lady: Elle is literally this, since she's an ice fairy. She's also been teaching Donut.
  Donut: Unwad your panties, Carl.
  Katia: [laughing] You got that from Elle.
  Donut: I know, right? She’s been teaching me sayings from the olden times.
  Carl: That’s not very princess-like.
  Donut: Oh, Carl. Just chillax.
• Creepy Child:
  • Carl meets a Changeling child who weirds him out. "It hadn’t been a thing before, but I now had a new phobia: creepy-ass little kids."
  • Bonnie the gnome greets Carl and Donut wearing a blood-soaked Dallas Cowboys jersey as a dress.
  Bonnie: Have you come to kill my father? You’re a little late. He’s already dead. Do you want to come in? I’m making lemonade!
• Despair Event Horizon: Like Frank in the previous book, Maggie My is ready to die.
• Dirty Coward: The second they end up inside the sharktopus boss, Vadim bolts for the escape hatch, giving not one single fuck that it won't work when he's inside a boss's mouth.
• Domestic Abuse: Katia directly compares the AI to an insane ex-boyfriend who murders you and your family for reasons you don't know after it sends infinite gerbils at the town until Carl finally gives in and starts stomping them.
• Exact Words: Carl repeatedly explains how he's going to use the Gate of the Feral Gods to trash the ninth floor. Except that's not what he does.
  Zev: This is not what you promised!
  Carl: I promised nothing.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The description on the transfigured glass Lika includes an inscription from Ghazi in which he calls her "M'lady", hinting at his status as a gross incel.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Early in the book, when Carl visits Skarn and his telescope for the first time, Skarn says that Flint says the gnomes are little shits who deserve to be torn apart by feral geese.
  • Just before the Buzzard Borough Boss wakes up and attacks Carl, Donut, and Katia, Chris manages to take over the Sea Quadrant Throne room, which was the control room of the sub run by the Buzzard's former master. When it wakes up and they look at it again, it's no longer a Bereft Minion and they've been designated enemies of its new master.
  • Carl was given the Yam as a way to deal with lava stuff much later in the dungeon. Mordecai comes up with a clever use for it to deal with the problem with Chris.
  • Donut is initially horrified by Zev's changed attitude and behavior following her re-education. She cheers up fairly quickly with no explanation. Not in this book, anyway.
  • Mordecai tells the team that anything with "feral" in its name is bad news. In a book titled "The Gate of the Feral Gods".
• Gone Horribly Right: Borrant and the Bloom filed in court for Carl to be able to use the Gate of the Feral Gods because they thought it would be good ratings. They had no idea how he would end up using it.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: The System AI is very excited when the Gate of the Feral Gods comes up.
  New Quest. The Gate of the Feral Gods.
  Henrik the Changeling. Commandant Kane. The Mad Dune Mage. They all have pieces of the artifact. Take it from them. Collect all three. Put them together. What happens next is pretty damn neat.
  Reward: Oh boy-oh-boy. Oh boy-oh-boy.
• Ironic Echo: When Loita tells Carl to leave off helping the little girl, Bonnie, because "Audiences don't like melodrama", that's the moment, seeing the NPCs living real lives and comforting a grieving child, he decides to orchestrate her assassination. As Loita lies dying in a production trailer, cursing him and all dry species as a rot on the Bloom he smiles and reminds her "Nobody likes melodrama, Loita".
• Irony: Carl isn't too thrilled to be sponsored by an anti-crawl pacifist group. Little does he know that the person in charge of that group is none other than the author of the second edition of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook.
  • Mordecai is incredibly upset that Carl has turned the saferoom into a daycare for NPC children. Mordecai will go on to "hire" the most disabled of those children as "staff" for the saferoom in order to keep them safe. He'll then go on to spend a lot of his time entertaining them and letting them use him as a makeup dummy to keep them happy.
• Lady Mondegreen: In-Universe, Donut misheard the lyrics of "Secret Agent Man" as "Secret Asian Man", protesting that, smart though he is, Carl can't pull of "secret Asian man murders".
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Loita dies in an explosion. Carl successfully manages to kill Loita in such a way that it's not actually possible to prove that Carl did it. The neutral liaison Orren is genuinely impressed. He's so impressed he thinks Carl's much more a genius assassin than he actually is... though Orren may have been The Mole.
• Mistaken for Badass: A downplayed example, played for laughs, because Carl is a smart badass, he just didn't know everything the Syndicate Liaison thought he did. The Liaison is correct that Carl planned the assassination of Loita, but he added a few steps and didn't know about others, because Carl's plan simply relied on the shittiness of the highly explosive toy cat.
  • The Liaison thought that:
    1. Carl lured the robot cat onto his Sapper Table to amplify the power of its explosives...
    2. Then blew up his Hobbo Disco Ball grenade to coat it in the resulting residue, which...
    3. Combined with the humidity of Loita's rebreather to degraded the bomb's structural integrity...
    4. Culminating in a lethal explosion when Loita headed for the interview room in order to...
    5. Stop his deliberate sabotage of the interview, causing...
    6. the cat to jump on the floor to stay close to her, as Carl had ordered it to, dislodging the panel in its head and triggering its anti-tamper explosive.
  • In fact, Carl did do a lot of that, but he had no knowledge of the chemistry the Liaison invoked and most of his questions in the Green Room were annoying misdirects to set up the sabotage, not an attempt to gauge the massive clusterfuck that would follow the assassination, because Carl doesn't know anything about galactic law or politics.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Donut finally gets Carl to start paying attention to their view-meter. Knowing that their view-count has spiked is what clues him in to the fact that his conversation with "Chris" is a hell of a lot more significant than he thinks and makes him wary for other clues.
• Nailed to the Wagon: Mordecai makes potions for Louis and Firas that instantly and violently sobers them up, then makes it impossible for them to use any drugs (including alcohol) for the rest of the floor.
  Louis: Not cool, man. Not cool. It's all I got left.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Zev returns from her re-education, she's all business and tells Carl and Donut to get out there and kill kill kill! Donut is concerned. The fact that Donut rapidly becomes unconcerned is also a clue, one that won't be cleared up until the next book.
• Perverse Sexual Lust: Ghazi the Glass Mage was manipulated into his current predicament thanks to his crush on Lika, a fictional character... his waifu.
• Properly Paranoid: Carl spends some time quizzing Mordecai about the sixth and ninth floors. Katia is concerned.
  Katia: Carl, why do I get the feeling you're about to do something stupid?
• Rage Against the Heavens: Just before he exits the fifth floor with Donut, Carl delivers one last challenge to the assholes of the universe, holding up the Ring of Divine Suffering Mordecai begged him to discard.
  Carl: You guys see this thing? I’ll tell you what. If you want it, it’s yours. It’s right here. Come and get it, motherfuckers. Actually, you know what? I have a better idea. No need to come to me because I’ll be coming to you. That’s my pledge to you and to everyone else watching this. By the time the sixth floor collapses, every single hunter who dares to set foot on the same floor as us will be dead. This I swear on my life. One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.
  • He does.
• Rage Breaking Point: When Quan Ch attacks Orthrus for the loot, potentially dooming hundreds of fellow crawlers, Carl loses his shit and finally attacks a fellow crawler. While he doesn't kill him, he does rip off his arm when he runs the fuck away from Carl using some sort of rocket jump.
  Donut: You know what, Carl? I’ve decided something. I think they’re right about you. I think you’re crazy. Like, not a little weird crazy. Not guy who eats cereal without milk crazy. But crazy, crazy. Straitjacket crazy.
• The Reveal:
  • The epilogue reveals that Bea, her dick boyfriend, and Ferdinand (AKA Gravy Boat) survived the collapse.
  • We learn what Maggie My's new race is.
  • Carl learns, at the same time we do, that the Pacifist Network is being run by former crawlers, specifically he learns that his new doll-head-throwing xistera extension was designed by one Dr. P. Hu, the first crawler to receive the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook.
• Revenge Before Reason: All Maggie cares about is killing Carl. It doesn't matter that what happened to her daughter was more her fault than his. Except that she's given up on revenge. The Caprids have told her that the dungeon can resurrect people killed by the Collapse, and she'll be forced to kill her other daughter if she doesn't kill Carl.
• Rousseau Was Right: Apart from Quan and a single group attacking the puppy, the endgame of the floor using the Gate to save all the trapped crawlers is a complete success, with no one trying to steal the valuable artifact and doom the remaining survivors.
• Serious Business: Donut really, really wanted to knock that vase off the high shelf back home. That thing was a menace, Carl. It was haunted.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: No, not the Orthrus thing, the attempt to get from Hump Town to the Bactrian village. Carl and Katia go to a lot of effort to build the Royal Chariot so they can cross the desert, only for the lower level team in the tomb to kill the pig and get the gnomes to bomb it.
• Shout-Out: Mordecai's short rant to Carl about how the saferoom isn't a daycare mirrors Jimmie's rant from Pulp Fiction about how his house isn't "dead *** storage".
  Mordecai: This isn’t a goddamned daycare, Carl. Do you see a jungle gym? Because I don’t see a fucking jungle gym.
• Stealth Pun: Lampshaded by Louis, who finds it hilarious. The bar in Hump Town is the Toe. The Camel Toe. It's a vagina joke. When a girl wears really tight pants, it kinda looks like a camel's hoof. Or a Camel Toe. That's the joke.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Unfortunately for the Royal Court, they get subjected to this when they go back to the sub to turn off the water pump. The AI brings in an Octo-Shark (which it acknowledges is a stupid name that's not as good as Sharktopus, but it's based on a real species and doesn't have a choice) to swallow a sub the size of a skyscraper and force them into a Boss Battle.
• Surrounded by Idiots: The Royal Court first meets Louis and Firas, two drunks who somehow managed to make it this far due to an overpowered spell that they aren't exploiting properly. The rest of the crawlers in the bubble are only slightly better.
• Take That!:
  • Mordecai tells Carl that "There’s no such thing as a non-profit religion.".
  • Katia gags when she drinks Mountain Dew and asks how anyone can stand something so vile.
• Tragic Keepsake: The arm Carl acquires has three rings on the hand. One is a simple buff to strength, another that makes it a lot easier to be a kill-stealing asshole, and the third... a simple gold ring that says "For Daddy".
• Unnecessarily Creepy Robot: The Donut robot is cheap and ugly and quotes Garfield about loving lasagna and hating Mondays. It will also swivel its head 180 degrees and say "I'm sorry, Carl. The void is wet and hungry.".
• Video Game Caring Potential: Katia uses Ghazi's notes to carefully map out the ninth floor with help from Mordecai. She and Carl flood the ninth floor, destroying all of the infrastructure necessary for the rich assholes playing their games to build up their armies, while leaving the NPCs on the ninth floor alive.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mordecai keeps trying to reign Carl in, but Carl... he's just Carling it up.
• You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: In a quiet moment at the end of the fifth floor, Carl comforts Donut with something that reflects Rorschach's Badass Boast when he's imprisoned in Watchmen, "Once the sixth floor opens, we’ll all be locked in together. They’ll be just as trapped as we are.". ("I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!.). Then he turns and delivers the threat directly to the sky.

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