Dungeon Crawler Carl
by Matt Dinniman
One day, without warning, the surface of the Earth is demolished and the surviving humans are dropped into a massive underground dungeon system that is being broadcast as entertainment to the rest of the galaxy. Carl is a divorced guy from Seattle who ends up in the dungeon with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, an absolute disaster of an animal who turns out to be extremely good at this. The dungeon runs on video game logic: levels, loot, skills, experience points. It is also very much trying to kill everyone. The audience watching from space loves it.
“Donut. What did you do. No. Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
What It Actually Felt Like
I had no idea what this was going to be before I started it. Someone recommended it, I looked it up, saw “LitRPG” in the genre tags and couldn’t pass on it. I enjoy playing video games so I felt like I had to be target audience. (Can’t ignore the HYPE around it, very well deserved to say the least.)
What Dinniman does that the description doesn’t fully capture is write satirically. The dungeon is reality TV. The audience is the galaxy, watching humans scramble and die for entertainment, and the dungeon masters are producing a show, which means they have metrics to hit and advertisers to please and narrative arcs they need their contestants to be performing. Carl keeps getting leveraged into protagonist behavior because the ratings go up when he’s being heroic or chaotic and the show needs that. It’s genuinely funny in a way that is also genuinely angry at the thing it’s making fun of.
Princess Donut is not a joke or a mascot. She’s a character with a specific personality, specific motivations, and specific competencies, and watching her and Carl work out how to function as a team inside a system designed to destroy them is one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable dynamics I’ve read in a while.
The world building is built through loot descriptions and skill trees and dungeon announcements, which sounds gimmicky and becomes completely immersive. I listened to this as an audiobook paired with eBook (I did also end up buying the physical book halfway through) and I cannot overstate how much the audiobook adds to the experience. Jeff Hays does the narration and the cast of voices he brings to this — the dungeon announcer, the NPCs, the game show energy of the whole thing — makes the world feel like it’s actually broadcasting. There are sound effects layered in. When a floor announcement drops it hits differently when it sounds like a production. I cannot explain why a dungeon floor announcement made me emotional. The audiobook made me understand why.
The Honest Part
The humor is sometimes very online, which will land exactly right for some people and be slightly “ehh..” for others. It’s also extremely long, and the LitRPG structure means a lot of stat-checking and item descriptions that you either get into or don’t. I got into it. Your mileage may vary. Give it fifty pages before you decide. If you’re on the fence, switch to the audiobook — it makes the case for you.
Who This Is For
Anyone who has been curious about LitRPG but assumed it wasn’t for them, this is the entry point. It’s also for readers who want their genre fiction to be actually saying something between the explosions.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goddamnit, Donut! So much fun. Listen to the audiobook version its almost a requirement.
Tags fantasy, LitRPG, humor, fast-paced, mood: chaotic fun
