Information Systems Manager Will Duke recommends Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.
I love absurdity, I’m not ashamed of a little whimsy. Song lyrics, poetry, short stories, TV shows, movies: give me something weird, and I’ll check it out.
But I don’t usually read books where the hero’s most meaningful relationship is with a talking cat. I didn’t choose this book; my wife made me read it. Thank you, baby. Now, I just finished book eight. Matt says the series will be nine books, but the ninth will be split into two because it’s so long. So, ten. Please hurry, Mr. Dinniman.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is the first installment in Matt Dinniman’s wildly inventive LitRPG series (An RPG is a Role Playing Game, for you non-nerds. Yes, like Dungeons & Dragons,) in which the entire surface of the Earth has been destroyed by alien invaders, and the surviving earthlings have been deposited into an underground dungeon.
Said dungeon is the set for a massively popular intergalactic reality TV show.
Our protagonist, Carl, is the classic reluctant hero. Carl navigates this nightmare in his bare feet and boxers with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. Princess Donut, the classic talking cat, becomes both his most valuable ally and a font of amusing commentary and humiliation.
This book has no right to work as well as it does. The premise is absurd. The genre, LitRPG, where characters gain experience points and level up like video game avatars, is niche, to say the least. This story works because underneath the dungeon crawling and the stat calculations and the increasingly unhinged AI DM (Dungeon Master, the director of the action, for you non-nerds), there is a genuinely funny, human story about a not particularly heroic man rising to the occasion, a reluctant Rambo, if you will.
There is also a delightfully diverse cast of complex characters that have pulled me through all eight books now.
Even the NPCs (Non-Player Characters, for the non-nerds) have character arcs. Heroes do villainous things and villains have their humanity restored. Almost everyone wrestles with the morality of their actions.
One of the most delightful aspects of the book is the satire. The dungeon’s corporate overlords, the media manipulation, the way desperate people perform for an audience that is rooting for them, sometimes to win and sometimes to die, as long as the action is entertaining, lands with more bite than you might expect from a book that leans heavily on a social media obsessed cat.
Fair warning: This is not literary fiction. It is loud, fast, ridiculous, and frequently over-the-top gory and coarse.
But if you’re willing to meet it on its own terms, it’s outrageously fun and much smarter than you expect. Don’t pre-judge the book by your own bias towards talking cats. This cat has depth.
