Review

When Carl’s ex-girlfriend’s prize Persian cat, Princess Donut, escapes his apartment on a freezing cold winter’s night, he scrambles out after her in bare feet and boxer shorts , thus surviving the extinction of every Earth inhabitant under shelter. To avoid hypothermia, Carl and Donut enter giant entryways to a subterranean dungeon, becoming contestants in a computer game-like alien reality show. They fight mobs and bosses, loot corpses, unlock achievements, gain prize boxes and level up. Or they die. It’s one or the other.

*

This was a lot of fun. It’s a subgenre of fantasy/sci-fi called LitRPG, in which characters are stuck in computer RPG (role playing game)-like environments, with quests, stats and levels. I’d never heard of it before I read an article in the New York Times about the enormous success of Dinniman’s books. (This is a gift article link, until it runs out of giftiness.)

So I jumped straight onto Libby to give it a go. Not being a gamer, I initially found some of the lingo a tad annoying:

You have been designated Crawler Number 4,122. You have been assigned the Crawler Name “Carl”. You are assigned the race of Human. You are currently level 1. You may choose a new race and class as soon as you descend to the third floor. Your stat points have been assigned based on your current physical and mental profile. See the stat menu for more details.

But I soon got used to it, and after that it was total immersion reading. It’s page-turning action-comedy-fantasy/sci-fi that reminded me of classics in that genre, like Discworld, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf. If you like those books, you should definitely try this one. And if you like this one, there are a lot more where that came from: six more, currently, with #8 due to be published in 2026.

Fun, light, occasionally satirical reading for comic-fantasy/sci-fi fans, narrated from Carl’s first person perspective. Due to length and a few swears and vaguely adult references, it’s probably better suited to Year 10 & up. However, at 464 pages (in Penguin paperback), it might not be great for a school library because students are very length-sensitive. I’ll look at it in-person before I make a call on that one. I work at a girls’ school, though – I think this would play much better in a boys’ or co-ed school.

> Click here for content info – spoilers, enter at your own risk!

Regular, but not excessive swear words, including f-, s-, and one c-word; plentiful fantasy violence, death and gore, but it’s all cartoonish in nature; a few very brief references to sexual violence, but not at all on-page or a possible fate for human characters; humorous fake sexual video made of two of the characters, but we don’t see any of it, no details; Carl had a difficult childhood with neglectful parents; a minor (TV host) character has enormous naked breasts, but it turns out that these are entirely fake and detachable; a brief video flashback is played of a mother choking her child to death – there seems to be more to this tragic story, but it looks like we’ll have to read the next book to discover what it is.

*

Dinniman, M. (2020). Dungeon Crawler Carl. Dandy House.

Images are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.

I read this novel for free thanks to Libby — support your public library by visiting & borrowing!