Dungeon Crawler Carl is a book that has taken the internet and book buying public by storm and the storm seems to be raging ad infinitum. This is the book that has supposedly convinced men and boys to start reading again. This is a core book in modern “dude fiction” canon, but is also a series, asking folks to work their way through seven books at time of writing with apparently an eighth on the way. To briefly summarize my summarize my thoughts on the book so you can make your snap judgment about if you’re interested in reading the rest of this, I wish with my whole soul that a more interesting book was the eye of this whole men reading again storm.

This fails at so many aspects I desire from books, which I will delineate, but the core sin it has committed is not respecting me as a reader. Dungeon Crawler Carl is so afraid of taking risks, entirely averse to making me care about the stakes, and worst of all, uninteresting. That’s not to say that this book is terrible. It’s just violently, aggressively, earth-shatteringly simple. Plain. Bare.

This book unfortunately feels like a big, dumb, action movie of a book. This is your Marvel movie, this is mission impossible 200, this exists in the grand tradition of safe media that will guaranteed sell. It’s slightly more edgy and adult because it can say the word “fuck” and make jokes about rape and fake gay sex videos, but that’s the extent of it’s ideological differences. Now that I’ve brushed the broad strokes, I want to actually stylistically get into my problems with this book.

The worldbuilding here falls flat on it’s face for me because it breaks the first rule of serious fantasy worlds for me. Whenever I am planning on running or playing in a TTRPG game, be it D&D, Pathfinder, what have you, the first rule is that if this is going to be a serious story with some humor then the setting should be serious and the humor be brought by the happenings within. If the goal is for this to be a comedic story, I prefer the structure of that to be flipped. Where this book rubs me wrong is that the book never commits one way or another. Some examples of the silliness are: “Doesn’t cure poison or other health-seeping conditions such as succubus-inflicted gonorrhea. So remember to wrap it up, bucko.” from a standard healing potion. “…Banging monster girls is not the narrative we’re going for with this story.” Donut quips when a goblin propositions Carl. “Bugaboos may be found anywhere on the dungeon’s lower floors, often lying in wait for Crawlers to pass by so they can jump out and… do things to them. They’ll tell you they just want to cuddle. That’s probably a lie.” when describing an important creature. There’s all sort of stuff like this spread throughout the book. It’s so incredibly unserious.

The other half of the story is a contemplation upon humanity and their resilience in the face of extreme adversity. Carl is constantly pondering the necessity of committing incredible acts of violence against human figures, the death toll of this dungeon, and how this sadistic game show will not break him. It’s like the author is afraid that we might make fun of them for saying something earnest so they have to hide behind ironic quips and references to media.

Speaking of references to media, this book heavily relies upon references to explain ideas or describe things. If you aren’t aware of what they’re referencing, you just miss some things. When I noticed the quantity of references that were being made, I started to note down the literal references or the less direct ones I think I identified. The list is as follows:

Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder RPG, The Matrix, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jean Claude Van Damme, Ancient Aliens (maybe), The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, Blockbuster Video, James Bond, Survivor, Running Man, Harry Potter (You’re a wizard, crawler!), Frogger, Monster Energy Drink, The Dark Knight (And. Here. We. Go!), Charles Bronson, The A-Team, HGTV, Lifetime, Twitch TV, Godzilla, Basket Case (movie), Charlie bit me, War of the Worlds, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Pac-Man, Knight Rider, Bambi, Martyrs (movie), MacGyver(The old one, not the remake), Star Trek, Juggs Magazine, The Lion King, Dimmu Borgir and Satyricon (both Norwegian black metal bands), LuLaRoe (The leggings MLM discussed), Say Anything (Movie), Elon Musk, The Incredible Hulk, Gossip Girl, COPS, Judge Judy, Riverdale, Divorce Court (show), Mythbusters, Wal-Mart, Oasis (band), Paris Hilton (and tinkerbell, her dog), and finally, Steve Irwin.

Most of these serve either as a stand-in for the effort of describing something or as a nudge to the reader. Do you remember this thing? This thing is like that other thing. Maybe it’s uninspired to make this comparison, but it’s like I’m back to watching family guy.

Along the lines of reference as a stand in for explanation, this book suffers from some pretty egregious instances of telling, not showing. The one that genuinely struck me was Donut figuring out how to be annoying with the messaging system. It’s such an insane missed opportunity for humor. SHOW ME HOW YOU FIGURED IT OUT. “Donut: YES O.K. THERE WILL BE MONSTERS IN THERE. ’Stop,’ I said. ‘Please stop.’” This is how the issue at hand was introduced. Then we’re told that Carl showed Donut the menu and that “Donut spent a good ten minutes sending me message after nonsensical message until I finally told her to stop.”. Why don’t we get to experience that too? It’d be a great opportunity to continue to build that connection between Carl and Donut. We just don’t get it. We also blazed through the training of Mongo with a lot of it just ended up being told to us. It’s as if the author was getting bored of this section of the book himself.

When it comes down to the themes of the book, there are a few here. We have statements being made about the inhumanity of mass-produced entertainment and the lengths that could go to create it’s product. So far in this book, nothing really exciting has happened on that front. Carl complains about the oppression he’s suffering under the thumb of this production but there’s nothing he can do about it so he has to play along. Secondly there’s this idea of the resilience of humanity and how “YOU WILL NOT BREAK ME” as is emblazoned upon the front of the hardcover edition. Sure, it could probably be received as human and uplifting, but the goal of this game is to whittle down the combatants down to a tiny amount so that they may regain control of their planet. There is no good outcome here. If a small handful of humanity is left over, without there being like a thousand people the math doesn’t work out for what’s left. What is humanity without humans?

Finally, you could portray this as a sort of meta-fiction about media. The book constantly describes how the “AI” will choose the funniest things to give Carl from his loot boxes. Taking it a step higher, the author is just the AI making this decision. This is admittedly a more interesting reading of the story, but I think the Donut fourth wall break earlier doesn’t really support that endeavor.

In summation, this book is just fine. I wish it were as groundbreaking and mind blowing as the litany of five out of five star reviews were seeming to evidence. I wish I were scrambling to my local bookstore to get all the rest of the books in the series, but this just isn’t that good. At best it’s a great turn off your brain an just enjoy things book but I feel we are doing ourselves a disservice by doing so. There are so many great books out there that will challenge us more, make us feel more, make us think more, that I think you’d be better served by reading those than picking this one up off the shelf.