Author: Matt Dinniman
# of Pages: 439 (ebook)
Genre: Adult, Science Fiction, Humor
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.
Review: I went into this knowing I'm not the target audience (gamer bros, especially those into role playing games like DnD). I actually was more entertained than I thought.
Dungeon Crawler Carl mostly focuses on power fantasy where Carl gets to perform amazing acts of heroism and selflessness despite the odds being stacked against him (think: saving the weak from monsters, standing up to bullies). Some of this was incredibly cheesy/cringey, but some people may appreciate the positivity.
The story unsurprisingly is of Carl's traversal through a multi-leveled dungeon with fantastical enemies, with all the level ups, achievements, boss battles you'd expect in a video game of the same genre. I'm not a gamer, but I was vaguely familiar with some of the concepts. This shouldn't be a major issue for readers who are unfamiliar; there's A LOT of explanations of the dungeon (world building) that is actually a bit of a slog to get through. I didn't get into the flow of the book until over halfway through (with more world building yet to come).
This is mostly a sci-fi adventure HUMOROUS book. The humor is actually a large part of the writing style; the storytelling is very casual and crass. If crude humor isn't your thing, you'll like find the book to be juvenille and distasteful and not enjoy it very much. Think: foot fetish, sex jokes.
Not really my style, so my 3 star rating is mostly a measure of how much I enjoyed the story. If Dinniman's goal was to write an absurd, darkly humorous and unserious dungeon crawler story, he's definitely achieving that (5 stars to that??). I'd consider reading more of this series mostly curious on how the characters will develop further, but I would definitely only recommend this book to people who are already interested in the premise.
