Dungeon Crawler Carl

What. A. Book. It drew me in being so funny and fresh, and then the deep dark feelings began. I can't wait to read the next one and rejoin Carl and Princess Donut!

This was a reread for me but I really enjoyed it! I forgot that Donut is a tortie so made me give my baby extra cuddles thinking of her sass! I also had forgotten how gross some things were lol but I love this genre and recommend this book to people all the time!

The audio book for this was amazing the voice actors did a great job and I fell helplessly in love with donut and carl

As soon as Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl begins, the world is destroyed. Everyone who was inside a building of any kind is killed instantaneously as every structure on Earth is flattened into the ground. It’s the middle of the night in Seattle when this happens and Carl happens to be outside in just his boxer shorts and a leather jacket chasing after his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, an annoyance that winds up saving his life. As he tries to get his bearings, mysterious stairwells appear around the ruined city and a disembodied voice announces that he and the millions of survivors remaining on Earth can enter them to participate in a violent intergalactic gameshow that will see them attempting to make their way down through 18 levels of dungeons filled with dangerous creatures. It isn’t mandatory, but those who don’t enter will be left to fend for themselves on the now-desolate surface, and once the doors close, they won’t reopen. Carl quickly decides to take his shot with the dungeon and so he and Princess Donut go through the door, thus beginning their adventure. Once inside, Donut is able to speak and the pair both begin seeing text floating before their eyes that shows things like stats, health, and tutorial information, much like in an RPG videogame. It’s a conceit that feels like it shouldn’t work, what with it setting up dry recitations of stat boosts and loot box contents, but they’re written with a snarky and juvenile sense of humor that is well-informed on pop culture, and so they often provide some comic relief as the proceedings grow darker. And this book is not afraid to get dark, though it only touches on its more distressing material, sometimes even dancing right up to the line of being offensive without actually crossing it, though your opinion may vary in that regard. This time around Dinniman is happy to keep things mostly fun and silly, despite the often-grisly violence, though there are hints that future installments (of which there are already several) will probably delve into more serious material. Carl isn’t the most developed character, instead serving as more of a fantasy cipher for the reader, a choice that works here to attempt to recreate the immersion of a game. Princess Donut however oozes personality and fairly quickly becomes a favorite. Other characters seem to exist mostly to serve the plot, though they still manage to hold our interest. This is the sort of book one turns to purely for entertainment and it delivers that in spades. There are hints of deeper thematic material swirling throughout, and they will probably be examined further as we descend deeper into the dungeon, but in these first few levels the focus is firmly on fun, and by the time we finish this first installment it’s hard not to want to immediately dive into the second. Originally published on AFPL Journal https://afpljournal.com/2025/07/02/book-review-dungeon-crawler-carl-by-matt-dinniman

Hilarious, thrilling, and nerdy! Highly recommend for anyone, well maybe not your grandma!