Dungeon Crawler Carl (Book #1) by Matt Dinniman

Official Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I just had to read it.

When something is as hyped up as Dungeon Crawler Carl, my curiosity often gets the better of me. When a series inspires people to binge eight books and defend it like a religion, I have to know why.

Now that the experience is over, I think I’ve found the answer. The thing about Dungeon Crawler Carl is that it’s not really a novel at all — at least, not in the way I view a novel.

For the uninitiated, Dungeon Crawler Carl can be summarized as a story about an alien invasion/apocalypse, where surviving humans are forced into dungeons to play in a video game style open world RPG that works almost like an alien game show, complete with interviews, loot boxes, and boss fights.

Carl, the protagonist, competes in the same party as his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, who becomes sentient and communicative after eating a special treat upon their entrance.

This book has a cult following on the internet. So much so that when I criticized the writing on Threads, many people essentially told me that I was out of line and that they weren’t sure what I was expecting.

The writing in this book is a real issue for me. The prose prioritizes game mechanics over subtext or implication, which made the reading experience feel repetitive to me. I don’t want to be mean, but there were so many lines in this book that made me roll my eyes, notably the times when the author describes something in great detail, then restates what just happened for clarity.

He’ll describe the loot boxes, the inventory, the boss fights, and then say: “This is just like a video game.”

He’ll describe Donut’s leg setting back into place, her heath bar going up, the green taking over the red, and then say: “She was healing.”

Some lines in the book are especially clunky and really don’t mean anything outside of video game language. These three below I had a hard time getting past.

“There was a strange sense of motion to the room and I immediately knew we were on a boat. I could tell from experience that it was large, but not huge.”

“Her intelligence was now level 21, which meant she could fire 8 missiles if she kept the power level at 3.”

“That wasn’t true with bullies. I knew this from experience. It was the opposite with bullies. I knew exactly what was about to happen.”

Lines like “I knew from experience it was large but not huge” and “I knew exactly what was about to happen” should be deleted, or rewritten, or I don’t know…

I brought this up on a Threads post, and the advice that most people gave was that I should not be reading the book. I should be listening to the book via Audible. That would improve the experience. But imagine that?

Imagine writing a book that your die hard fans don’t want to read, but rather would listen to? I’m not against audiobooks by any stretch of the imagination, but if I wrote a book that people didn’t want to read, I would be mortified.

In a way, Dungeon Crawler Carl isn’t a novel, it’s a radio show of a video game. I understand that now. As a lover of literature, this resulted in an experience that I can’t rate highly as a book, per se, but at the same time, I appreciate it for what it is..

For this reason, I still give Dungeon Crawler Carl 3 stars. The story itself is funny and entertaining and the characters of Carl and Princess Donut are alive and easy to root for.

The “interview” segments of this book are especially strong. The dungeon itself, boss fights, loot boxes, all get repetitive and need some interruption. When Carl and Princess Donut go on talk shows to discuss some of their exploits, that’s where the magic is in these books. I wish there was more of these kinds of scenes.

Because this was book one, there was a lack of tension in this book that I really craved as I was reading it. In a book of many boss fights and “kill, kill, kill”, it never really felt like Carl or Donut had any chance of dying. They are overpowered for most of the book against the smaller creatures on the first and second floors.

I only really feared for Carl and Donut’s lives once in the book. A rule is established that nobody is allowed to go to the bathroom outside a sanctioned bathroom, and when an elderly man whips it out and pees in the hallway, a huge “Rage Elemental” is summoned that is way above level for Carl, Donut, and their companions.

It’s a fun scene, breaks the repetition, and the only real time I felt like they were in trouble. Maybe that’s because it is an eight book series and the two main characters have plot armor. It’s hard to say, but I just read Lonesome Dove, which also comes from a series, and I was on the edge of my seat through it all and knew, as GRRM famously said, that I was “playing for keeps”.

People are going to yell at me to read Book #2. I get that. Most of what I’ve read has argued that this book is the “tutorial” and the rest of the novels are where the real magic is. Maybe so. But can I commit to DCC #2 as my next read after a three star book? Can it be true that they get significantly better the deeper Carl and Donut go into the dungeon? I don’t know.

Regardless, three stars is better than I thought after the first couple of chapters and I’m glad that I didn’t DNF this book.

Onto the next one.

-KF

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My second novel, Medusa; Or, Men Entombed in Winter, is live on Amazon. Readers are calling it “among the top books [they’ve] read” and that they “cannot recommend this author highly enough.” Grab yourself a copy now!