I Am Having Fun. I Am Also Not Okay.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Look, at this point, I should know better than to trust Dinniman not to emotionally sucker-punch me, but here we are again. Book 6 is another delirious, unhinged ride through the Crawl, and somehow it still manages to surprise me with both the absurdity and the gut-level sincerity.

There were a couple of moments that really nailed me to the wall. The whole thread about parents casting shadows you can drown in? Absolutely feral. Dinniman isn't just slipping generational trauma into the middle of an arena anymore; he's mauling us with it, using things that definitely shouldn’t exist, and I’m just trying to keep my jaw off the floor. And then there’s all the business with opponents not even using their own decks correctly, little glitches that feel less like sloppiness and more like the AI tugging at the threads of its own game. It’s subtle, but it’s unsettling in exactly the right way.

The pacing is chaos (in a good way), the humor lands, the stakes keep climbing, and I am once again equal parts gutted and hyped out of my mind. I don’t know how many emotional lives this series thinks I have left, but it is determined to burn through them.

Wild. Fun. Brutal.

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Kids aren’t always a product of their parents. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes parents can cast a shadow so thick, you can drown in it.