Dungeon Crawler Carl: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure Paperback – September 21, 2020

A Coast Guard veteran and all around good guy, Carl, lives in an apartment with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. On a cold, winter night, Donut slips out of a window and gets stuck up a tree. And it’s a good thing she does! Wearing nothing but a jacket, boxers, and a pair of slippers that don’t fit, Carl goes outside to try to coax her down. He’s just about retrieved the cat, and then it happens.The whole world is changed. In the blink of an eye, every building, car, and piece of technology on the planet is flattened. Smooshed. Gone. A bodiless voice announces that anyone who doesn’t want to live off whatever is left on the planet will need to enter stairs. Carl and the cat do so, and that’s when the fun starts.It seems the galaxy has had a long-running and massively popular television program that follows “dungeon crawls”—classic role-playing/video game scenarios where adventurers go into a medieval dungeon, explore, fight monsters, win treasure, gain experience, become more powerful, and then proceed to deeper, harder levels. Earth has been selected to serve as the setting for the current season. That’s right. The Earth has been destroyed for the sake of a galactic television game. By entering the stairwell, Carl, Donut, and a couple million other humans have become participants in this game. Instead of remaining a pet, Donut is made into a fellow “crawler,” like Carl. She can speak, and reason, and fight—all with the personality one would expect from a cat named Princess DonutThe rules to this galactically televised dungeon crawl are intricate. But essentially, Carl and Donut begin to mentally see stat screens, just like in an RPG video game: health, various skills, their strength, dexterity, intelligence, and constitution. In classic 80’s kids Dungeons & Dragons style, they have unlimited encumbrance, meaning they can carry anything they can pick up, file it away in “inventory,” and pull it up whenever needed. They‘re on level 1 of this season’s crawl, a classic dungeon with tunnels, doors, chambers, and monsters—lots of different monsters. There’s a countdown running, so they only have so many days to find a set of stairs that will lead them down to the next, harder level. And if they don’t find the stairs before the timer runs out, the level they’re on will collapse. There’s all sorts of lethal dangers awaiting the crawlers. And that’s what takes up the bulk of the book.There are daring encounters, puzzles to sort through, and lots and lots of monsters to fight. In each encounter, the reader is given real time stats of the characters. After their initial shock, Carl and Donut slowly form an endearing partnership, one that proves quite successful in this dangerous game they‘re forced to play.I’ll confess for the first quarter of the book, I was skeptical. It felt an awful lot like one of my kids watching someone else playing a video game (which is something I don’t really understand). But Matt Dinniman does a masterful job of weaving in enough subplots—both inside and outside the dungeon—so that both a cohesive story and genuine character development emerge from all the excitement of fighting kobolds, or rigging goblin explosives, or figuring out how to slay a “big boss” monster that vaguely resembles a cat-hoarding old lady. There’s depth to this dungeon.And of course there’s action. It’s compelling, page-turning, fun. And funny. Dinniman has a sharp, occasionally crass, often dark sense of humor and he knows how to use it in all the right places. There’s snark, and absurdity, and physical comedy, and some snort-through-your nostrils lines. Think of a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign melded with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy vibe that‘s centered around a likable hero and a hilariously self-absorbed cat.I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely be pursuing the series. Highly recommended.

This book is fun. Some of the humor is a bit crude and suggestive, and there is a LOT of violence involved, so I can't recommend this book for kids. But if you're older than 16 and you want something that is quirky, social commentary, dangerous, weird, and has a good sense of adventure than you might like this one. And it's the first in a series so if you love it all the way to the last word, you can get the next book in the series and keep reading - I know I did.It's winter in Seattle. Carl's ex-girlfriend's high-bred prize-winning show cat has just decided - for the first time in her life - that she MUST explore the outdoors. So she just jumped out the window. It's 2:30 in the morning and Carl is in bed, trying to fall asleep. But if he loses that cat, his ex will murder him when she gets back from the cruise she's on with "the other man" (one of them anyway). So Carl heads outside to get the cat, only to find her stuck in a tree because she didn't like the way the snow felt on her paws. In his boxers, because it's 2 am and he's only expecting to be outside for a minute.That's when it happens: the entire apartment building, all the cars in the parking lot, all the buildings and vehicles on the street, as far as the eye can see in fact - they all get instantly sucked down into the earth, leaving nothing but a patch of freshly turned dirt behind. Everyone who was in a car, on a ship, on a plane, or indoors is killed instantly - worldwide. And then, all across the planet, a psychic loudspeaker activates and a strange alien voice tells everyone that the syndicate will be mining their planet, and anyone still alive has the opportunity to reclaim their world by descending down into their "dungeon crawl." Anyone who makes it down to level 18 can not only reclaim the planet's resources, but will be left to rule what's left of the Earth. Any survivors who choose not to enter the dungeon crawl will be left to fend for themselves on the surface as the planet's interior is strip-mined.So Carl takes his cat, Princess Donut, into the dungeon... not because he cares about ruling the world, but because he's not wearing any pants or shoes and it's FREEZING COLD tonight. Within the first week, nearly ten million people die in the dungeon. It is a hostile place. but in the dungeon, there are rules. The whole thing is run by a crazy AI with foot fetish, and organized by a certain interstellar corporation. There are other corporations who are in competition with this one, and they rotate between them to produce each season of a DUNGEON CRAWL: WORLD television program that is broadcast out to the entire galaxy. This season just happens to be produced by the corporation that owns the Earth. The ratings from that show, and the ad revenue that pours in, are the real treasure they're after, not Earth's tiny supply of minerals. So the rules are simple: don't die, don't piss of the AI or the syndicate, and make it entertaining because more dedicated viewers means the AI gives you better loot, which helps you live longer. Oh, and don't piss in the hallways.It's been a long time since I read something that is fresh and feels like it brings NEW ideas in a science fiction / fantasy adventure setting. This book does that. So I'm eager to start the second book now that I've finished this one. But it's 2:00am here in Maine, it's cold outside, and I'm in my boxers trying to fall asleep... so book 2 will have to wait until tomorrow.

Language warning! So much language.This book is funny, gory, and clever. Think Hunger Games meets John Ringo’s Posleen series. If you like reading about characters running from alien monsters that want to eat them and then surviving (sometimes) in clever and unexpected ways, check it out!ETA: I stopped reading sequels in this series pretty quickly because the language and crudity just keeps exponentially increasing - sorry, that’s not for me.