I Will Not Be Normal About This

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

5 MOTHER-F***ING STARS.
I don’t hand those out lightly (regular stars sure, but not MFing stars), but this one? Earned it. Demanded it. Kicked down my door and screamed it in my face.

Matt Dinniman continues to be absolutely unhinged in all the best ways. I mean, "You done stuck your pecker in the wrong beehive" had me wheezing, and then there’s the whole bit about a goddess whose clitoris becomes a bald man named Otis-Ray who begs to be fed cabbage. Why wouldn’t a tree be made of cheese? At this point, the real question is why I’m still surprised by anything in this series.

But the thing that always guts me with these books, and especially this one, is the way Dinniman weaves the absurd and the profound into a single emotional wrecking ball. There’s this line:

"When Big Things happen on such a large scale, it’s easy to forget sometimes that these Big Things are also happening to the little things in the world."

That sucker-punched me. Because yes, we’ve got planet-shaking battles and cosmic nonsense, but we also have these tiny human (and not-so-human) moments that hit way harder than they have any right to.

I flat-out cried telling my husband about this book. Not because anything was tragically sad necessarily, but because I felt hungover, emotionally, cosmically, spiritually, from the whole experience. And because the agony of no longer being able to binge the series is very, very real. Waiting is for the weak, and unfortunately, here I am.

Also: the cookbook author bits? RIP me.

This book. THIS BOOK. THIS SERIES.
Dinniman is out here writing comedy-litRPG-chaos-horror-heartstring-yanking masterpieces, and I will not be normal about it.

Bring on the next one, because I need it like Carl needs pants.

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