The eighth floor somehow manages to be the most emotionally brutal entry in the series while also featuring a crab named Raul saving the entire world, and I think that balance is exactly why this series keeps me hooked. Watching Carl and Donut navigate a haunted reconstruction of Earth, building a monster card deck while the dungeon quietly weaponizes every painful memory they carry, is equal parts exhausting and brilliant. The Iowa sequence involving Carl’s father hit harder than I expected, and Donut’s quiet, fierce loyalty throughout made it land even harder.
The final Cuba sequence is the best stretch of pages in the whole series so far, a chaotic, grief-soaked, improbably hopeful sprint to the stairwell that somehow involves demon portals, a Christmas party, a spider goddess taking over Carl’s body, and thirty-three thousand crawlers making it out alive. Ren’s choice alone would have made this a five-star book. The Eye tattoo binding Shi Maria to Carl is exactly the kind of lingering consequence this series does better than almost anything else, and I am already dreading and desperate for whatever comes next.