Reading Recap: Dungeon Crawler Carl

An unhinged D&D campaign meets Hunger Games

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My apologies for being a day late in my regular posts this week! I’m at a conference for my day job and I forgot to schedule this for the normal Tuesday slot, so it’s coming out a day late. In any case, enjoy!

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Dungeon Crawler Carl is an experience.

It’s just nuts. Right from the beginning, it’s just crazy and hilarious and utterly heartbreaking.

The basic premise is that the main character, Carl, is miraculously saved from the apocalypse by his ex-girlfriend’s crazy cat, Princess Donut, only to be thrown into a real-life, very deadly version of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign crossed with the Hunger Games.

If it sounds crazy, it really, really is. The first couple of audiobooks (these are only on audio) are equal parts funny, violent, and unnerving as Carl and Princess Donut make their way through the new world they’re thrust into.

Along the way they meet a lot of new friends, solve some mysteries, get involved in things they should probably avoid, and make more than their fair share of enemies.

As the series goes along, the tone gets progressively more serious. The reality of their situation becomes more and more apparent every step they take through the Dungeon. The Dungeon is set up in levels, and as you go down each level gets progressively more and more difficult. And more violent. And more terrifying.

And just flat-out terrible.

The entire premise of the series is based on the fact than an untouchable galactic megacorporation murdered nearly eight billion humans. By the time of the most recent book (#6-Eye of the Bedlam Bride), there are barely 30,000 humans left.

Thirty. Thousand. Humans. A 0.000375% survival rate.

That alone might not make an impression on you. After all, a single death is a tragedy, a million a statistic and all that. But the author fully brings out the horror of the dungeon and reinforces that feeling over time. You have this sense of slowly impending doom or creeping horror as things just get worse and worse and worse over time.

I listened to these stories in audiobook and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I didn’t think I’d enjoy LitRPG, but these surprised me. They are well done, well told stories. They’re told in first person, and there are some elements of hiding things from the reader on a number of occasions. But I give those a pass because it’s done sparingly and when it happens it’s entertaining and enjoyable. It absolutely leaves you wanting more.

A high point of the series is the absolutely top-notch characters and how they are portrayed. The main character, Carl, is tough, headstrong, brave, and terribly damaged by his experiences in the Dungeon. The other characters are the same. All struggle with something throughout the books.

How could you not struggle after an experience like that?It all comes together for a very believable and fleshed-out world.

This series is violent, profane, terrible, incredible, and many other adjectives. It also showcases incredible instances of heroism and self-sacrifice for which I have a lot of appreciation. If you think you might enjoy these, I’d recommend picking them up, they’re certainly worth your time.