Good Morning Folks. I took yesterday off and while I had planned on writing a blog post.. one never actually happened. Instead you are getting the post that I probably would have written yesterday, a day late. This weekend I finished my consumption of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series… and I have to admit I am a bit sad that it is over. This has quite possibly been the book series that I least expected to get into… and then hungrily consumed as quickly as possible after getting into the first book. I admit the whole LitRPG genre never really appealed to me… why read about playing a game when I could just be playing a game? However it can create a really interesting backdrop to tell a well written tale against, as is evidenced by the fact I just spent thirty six days tearing through this series one after another.
The premise of the series is what if you took Duke Nukem… made him lovable… gave him a talking cat companion that is even more lovable… and tossed them both into a Smash TV style Dungeon Crawl where they have to kill their way to the bottom… or die permanently because the planet has been reclaimed for resources by an external galactic bureaucracy. That is one hell of a run-on sentence, but also is about as close as I can really come to explaining the appeal of this series. What this series has in spades is heart. It has so many well written characters that you fall in love with, and genuinely want to succeed and survive… but also know that the odds are stacked against them in spite of quite a bit of literal plot armor. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is quite possibly the best sidekick ever crafted, and to call her a sidekick though is a bit of a disservice to how much of the plot revolves around her learning how to “adult”. All of the characters show deep growth over the course of the series, and even ones that you kind of sort of loath when you first encounter them… become beloved friends several books in.
What the book series has in abundance though is meaningful payoffs. There have been so many times that a loose plot thread from book one… turns into some significant event later down the line. The dungeon crawl itself has a deeply rich lore surrounding it, and has clear rules that remain in place for the entire series. There are always several different plot threads going at once, and usually colliding in the major event of the individual book. What is really fun however is looking at the artwork for each of the volumes after having finished the book… because there are always so many different moments that suddenly make perfect sense. Sometimes a book series runs out of juice… but this one only seems to be getting better the longer it runs.
On the 16th I finished up This Inevitable Ruin, and it was probably the most epic of the entire series. Even before reading it… I sort of assumed that would be the case given the plot points that were sure to be involved in this single book. It was effectively the culmination of a major event that had bee discussed in every single book of the series, and the resolution was most definitely worth the wait. Carl is a bit of a fuck up at times… and a pure Agent of Chaos… but he is OUR Agent of Chaos. Donut is occasionally very self centered… as is the case with every cat ever to exist on this planet… but she is OUR precious princess. Like I see in her actions literally hundreds of things that my own Gracie, Mollie, and Josie end up doing every day. I feel about Donut the same way that I am certain dog lovers feel about Oberon in the Kevin Hearne books.
So here is the point where I suggest you listen to the Audiobooks instead of reading them. So much of my enjoyment of this series is I think in large part to how well they are acted out by the amazing Jeff Hays of Soundbooth Theater. I decided the embed this video as an example, because it does not really give anything away or steal from you any revelations from the series. God Dammit Donut is sort of the catch phrase for Carl specifically… but other characters occasionally say it as well in the series. So here is a delightful video of Jeff shifting between 14 characters uttering that phrase, and you can see how wildly different each character feels as result. What is often even more entertaining is the in universe advertisement for Soundbooth Theater at the end of every book. These feel like the mid credit scenes in a Marvel movie, because they often have some sort of payoff for the next book in the series… that just happens to take place out of the flow of the novel itself.
The problem with finishing an amazing series… is that I always end up wanting more of it… now. From what I understand more recently there has been a year lag between volumes of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and since this last volume came out in November, it means I am going to have a bit of a wait on my hands. One of the other books that has been advertised throughout the audio books for Dungeon Crawler Carl, is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I love Kaiju… and I enjoyed the DCC series… and with a preposterous name like that I figured surely I would love it. The weird thing about this book is that it feels like it comes from an earlier era in Matt Dinniman’s career… when he had not quite found his voice, or more so the voice of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Technically this was published after the popularity of the DCC series, but I kind of wonder if this was a side project that had been shelved for a bit.
Essentially it is a very graphic bio-horror series about being trapped in a world of giant battling Kaiju and playing the support staff to keep them up and fighting. Have you ever dreamed about having an apartment in the bowel system of a giant monster? Oh yeah… me neither. It is most definitely interesting and I will have zero problem finishing it… but it is also just not really my jam. It makes me also think that maybe LitRPG is not really my genre. All of the game elements did not feel front and center in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and instead it was more of a character driven tale. This very much feels like a book about a game, and the characters themselves seem paper thin so far. Maybe this will change over time… but so far none of the characters are particularly likeable… whereas I fell in love with Carl and Donut almost immediately. It is wild how much of a difference having POV characters that you care about makes for the reading experience.
If you have yet to be infected by the mind virus that is Dungeon Crawler Carl, I suggest you give it a shot. Matt Dinniman has a fancy new publisher and as a result all of the books are being released with more mass-market friendly covers and artwork. I think they all look pretty cool, but also do not have near the heart… nor the final payoff that the original artwork does. They do however make them look far less like graphic novels… which might have been a turn off for some readers. Whatever form you choose to consume them in… I suggest adding them to your list. Give it at least two books, because it is really in the second book that the series comes into its own. I am hooked and am probably going to be consuming these every single time a new one is released going forward. I will probably seek out another popular LitRPG book just to give the genre another chance… but I am not entirely certain reading about a game is really my jam and that DCC might have simply just been a brilliant outlier.
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