You may not know this, but The Quill To Live reviewers all play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign together. Andrew is the DM (and a very good one, I might add). The rest of us (plus a few other friends) are subject to his dastardly ideas, attending a school that teaches students how to destroy gods. Alex plays a lizardfolk named Ingeir, and I bring that up because Alex has the worst luck of anyone I’ve ever seen when it comes to dice rolls. All the usual solutions (e.g., buying lots more dice) have failed, and he remains a cursed roller. As I listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the book feels like the literary equivalent of an Alex dice roll: funny for the wrong reasons and not as good as I hoped for.
Bye bye, earth! That’s what Carl and his 7 billion fellow humans might’ve said if they had any inkling of what would soon happen to the good ol’ blue marble. Alas, things happen quickly when an alien reality show is involved. Aliens transform Earth into a massive Dungeon death trap (much like pretty much anything Andrew thinks up for our campaign) through which humans must navigate to survive. Precious few make it past the first floor, let alone to the deeper and more dangerous ones. But Carl and his party member—Princess Donut, his ex’s Persian Cat—buy in out of sheer necessity and begin learning the Dungeon’s systems. Together, they wind through its challenges, meet allies, fight foes, and learn the rules of this mysterious dungeon. All the while, a timer ticks somewhere in the background, a deadline. They must get to the next floor, lest they be destroyed when this one collapses.
For me, Dungeon Crawler Carl was the equivalent of a forgettable summer blockbuster. It was fun while it lasted. It had plenty of issues. It wasn’t annoyingly bad, nor did it engage too deeply with its ideas. The book has B-Movie energy, particularly with regard to its need to overexplain its systems and plot. Carl and Donut are regularly met with messages from the powers that be explaining exactly what’s going on, how to use a specific weapon/system, and otherwise being bombarded with information dumps. While I understand the in-universe reasoning for these passages, they do little to make me feel like I’m free to explore the dungeon alongside Carl and Donut. I’m being force-fed information only before I can see our protagonist apply it.
There are no instances where the book overcame this issue for me. I can’t remember a single setpiece or fight from the novel, despite only having listened to it a few weeks ago. What I can remember is the vast number of times the explainer robot doled out information like a mush-filled spoon, as though I was a baby and the food was a metaphorical airplane soaring for my mouth. Sure, I ate it, but that doesn’t mean I liked it!
The characters are equally forgettable, aside from Carl and Donut themselves, and even then it’s a marginal difference. I couldn’t tell you many details about either one save for some really boilerplate stuff. Donut is a hoity-toity cat with an ego, while Carl is a down-on-his-luck schmuck whose previous military experience helps him stay alive in the dungeon death trap he now navigates. I wish I could name a single other character from the book and tell you something about them, but I genuinely cannot, and forgettability is the book’s biggest offense. It’s a step above “actively bad,” of course, but it’s still a big knock.
I see and hear readers comment on Dungeon Crawler Carl’s humor all the time. My response: what humor? I could see a big like this carrying two types of humor: situational, in which the actual events and goings-on are funny, or written, in which the prose and dialogue are packed with jokes. I left Dungeon Crawler Carl feeling like neither was true and that Dinniman was trying to accomplish both. Humor is subjective, so I hope for your sake that your mileage varies, but I didn’t laugh or even exhale through my nose one time.
Then we come to the prose, which, unfortunately, is not great. The phrase “what appeared to be” must’ve occured at least a hundred times throughout, to the point where I sighed and/or rolled my eyes whenever I heard it. “Carl saw what appeared to be a…” was an ultra-common sentence-opener, and that’s representative of the prose as a whole. I won’t go so far as to say it was bad. It was functional and fine. The dark spots were plentiful, but Dinniman’s prose is just decent enough to get a pass. It tells the story, which is what I suppose prose is meant to do!
At the end of it all, Dungeon Crawler Carl felt like a massive session 1 for a D&D campaign I don’t intend to continue. I’ve been told by fans that it just gets better and better. I believe those fans, but getting better from this low starting point just isn’t enough to get me through.
Rating: Dungeon Crawler Carl – 4.0/10
-Cole
Great review, felt much the same about the book. Forgettable and not something I’m going to continue with. Hope all’s well, Cole!
Thanks, Will! Miss you! Gushed to Andrew about This Is How You Lose The Time War and he said “Talk to Will”
Very sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy the first book. Personally, I think the series only gets better as you learn more about the dungeon, the other crawlers—both inside and outside the dungeon—and the broader world and how everything interconnects.
I can’t really speak to how much the prose or other issues you had improve in later books. I agree that it has a bit of a B-movie blockbuster feel, but I enjoyed myself so much that I didn’t really dwell on the points you mentioned.
I also think the audiobook adds a lot to the experience. Jeff Hays is incredible—I love his portrayals of Carl, Donut, and the AI. I think the AI is funny with some of its one liners and quips, the achievements can be funny. Also love the back and forth between Carl and PD.
Maybe it’s the RPG/video game player in me, but I really enjoyed the loot system. I’m always excited when they got a giant line of prize boxes to open, just to see what new gear, spells, or skills they’d acquire and how they’d put them to use.
All that to say—I’m buying you book two.
This review feels like someone who thinks they are better than the material. I got the audio book on a whim and finished the first 6 books in a week and a half and let me tell you I don’t do that often. This series is a breath of fresh air in the RPGlite genre that perfectly balances humor, drama and action. I give the first book a 8/10 and the series as a whole a 9.5/10
L take. Pretentious and obnoxious.
NEW ACHIEVEMENT: Too many quills in the same ink pot! Multiple reviewers from The Quill to Live have entered the dungeon!
REWARD: You get a new, better review!
The system AI has determined that Cole Rush’s review was stupid and unsatisfactory. Therefore, it is requesting that the one true Quill, Andrew, write a proper review for Dungeon Crawler Carl.