Skip to main content

Dungeon Crawler Carl

 


I have a guilty pleasure. I have been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and I am hooked. I read the first book a while back, and now I am up to book five.

Okay, the premise may sound a little wild, but here goes. One night (or day, as this event happens all over the Earth at the same time, no matter what time of day or night) all roofs collapse. Any person who is under a roof of any kind gets smashed flatter than a pancake. Instantly. Anyone who is in a car, or a house, or a building, is dead. This leaves only a fraction of the human race left alive. Why has this happened? Aliens did it. Why did they do it? For entertainment.

Carl, it seems, had gone outside in the middle of the night to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s cat (named Princess Donut). So now Carl and the cat found themselves in a subterranean labyrinth forced to participate in a game for the amusement of aliens. This game comes with nonplayer characters like orcs and goblins and dragons, but the nonplayer characters can kill you. Dead. So, you have to kill them first. Oh, and also the other humans might kill you too. Think of it like The Hunger Games, if The Hunger Games was funny. It is funny. For one thing the cat, Donut, has been gifted with the ability to speak. Donut the cat is a hoot. At times Donut is childlike and naïve, but at other times you realize that she is wise beyond her years. Nobody can put Carl in his place like Donut.

The other funny thing is the AI. Various groups of aliens are in charge of the game but the actual running of the game is done by the AI. At times the AI explains to Carl and the other "crawlers” (that’s what they call people trapped in the game: "crawlers") what is going on. It also describes newly introduced creatures to Carl and the many, many ways they can kill you, in gruesome hilarious detail. The AI also describes the effects of magical devices, spells, and potions, as well as the side effects which can kill you in many, many gruesome and hilarious ways.

If a crawler is careful and everything goes well, they can advance down the stairs to the next floor which will be even more ridiculously deadlier than the one they just escaped from, so they had better learn skills and gain useful items before they move to the next level, but, oh yeah, there is a time limit. They must go down to the next floor before the time runs out or the level they are on will collapse and they will be dead.

This series is violent. People and non-people meet very violent ends, and that might turn some readers off. But it is such an outlandish fantasy that the violence never bothered me. (I am whipping through these books way too fast.)

Feast or Famine (anthology)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Linear Nature of Time

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner
Post a Comment
Read more

The Screaming Silence

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...
Post a Comment
Read more