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I finished the recently released DCC book and it was by far the weakest yet.
The narration was top notch as always but the actual book was boring. I found myself zoning out frequently but there were like two moments in the book that were interesting (the start of one races and what happened at the very end).
It felt like the book lacked stakes and the plot and the solutions to the issues presented in the plot were not legible to the reader and things came off as mostly random shit happening and Deus ex machina rather than the characters making clever decisions with the resources they have available. The author relies a lot on not telling the audience what the characters are planning which is both profoundly unsatisfying and no longer justified by the narrative.
This book should probably have been condensed down to a few chapters of breakneck introduction to the next part of the story rather than be dragged out to an entire book. There wasn't really anything happening, no plot, no character development and no character power progression.
At this point I'm barely even interested in the next book but given the stakes set up at the end it could be interesting, but that depends on things actually progressing and the plot not feeling like Deus ex machina.
So prior to 8 coming out I reread 1-5 and 7. I think the loss ofKatia really shows. He's done all the main character development and exploration for Carl and Donut, and the only other deep character is resolved. He can claim "Imani is the heart of the group" "Louis is the heart of the group" but at the end of the day those aren't statements he's emotionally invested me in. I also think we've lost a lot to our Heros Journey, in that at this point in the journey we can't be relying on the old wise man (Mordecai) anymore, and he was a good character! I didn't hate the race premise like the cards, but there just wasn't real emotional core this time. It takes a lot to top books 5 and 7 and this just wasn't it. I think this should be wrapped up with book 9 rather than dragging it out two more novels.
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Agreed, for me, it still had a few great moments, but as an individual novel it's not much. The tone was a little too crapsack/gritty, there was negligible character and relationship development, and the majority of the book was preoccupied with side quests and meta level exposition that took too much away from the main plot of the novel itself, stretching it too thin and making it feel forced. I think Dinniman is definitely aware that this is a Thing that is happening with his series, as he said something to the effect that he understood how authors got bogged down in their own works in the afterword, which of course immediately made me think of ASOIAF, (though it would have easily been just as applicable for other sprawling series like, say WoT,) but it's clear that the world that he's building took precedence in this particular book and the characters were just along for the ride.
I've written one novel, about 100k words, with only two major characters and even within that I got about 85% of the way done and then took twice as long to finish it, because connecting everything seamlessly is very hard work and intractable dilemmas pop up everywhere. Can't imagine doing a whole series.
Congratulations on getting that far! I think the best I've done is halfway so far, and that's been over a decade now. I have a new idea brewing, but IDK if it'll ever amount to more than a few chapters because despite telling myself to write first, edit later, I can't even write more than a few sentences at a time without going back and tweaking something. Sadly, that's a significant improvement from my worst!
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I think he's painted himself into a bit of a corner, from a storytelling perspective. He's fallen into a pattern that's common in sci-fi and fantasy authors, where in the stakes must rise in each book. They see that readers like a thing, then try to do more of it. I get it on some level - as a writer you want to give the audience what they want. On the other hand, it's not sustainable. Imagine a version of the Odyssey where Odysseus had to personally kick Poseidon in the balls before he made it home.
This book feels like a conscious attempt by Dinniman to scale things back before the escalation reaches the point where he can't manage it anymore. I don't know if I enjoyed it much as a reader, but I think I see the reasoning.
Yep.Specifically, the tension between Carl trying to save everyone in a dungeon where each level is supposed to get progressively more difficult and kill many more crawlers was always going to come to a head, and Dinniman did manage to get the majority of the crawlers out of the picture moving forward, but largely at the expense of the novel itself. The underlying problem as a reader is that we never met most of those crawlers in the first place, and so we have zero investment in them as individual characters, and regardless of how much we don't want the generic crawlers to suffer and die, it's not enough of a hook to hang the meat of a novel on, so we're left to vaguely hope that the last two novels can get back to the good stuff while slogging through the necessary resolution of that particular longstanding point of tension in the overall meta.
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