Dungeon Crawler Carl

Matt Dinniman
Completed 2/17/2026, Reviewed 2/18/2026
5 stars

This book was a hoot and a half.  It’s LitRPG, a hybrid genre of science fiction and/or fantasy with the mechanics of a role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons, where the characters are aware they are in an RPG.  It has quests, battles, loot, managing stats and inventory, and leveling up.  Being relatively new to DnD (only been playing consistently for two years) and never having read LitRPG before, I thoroughly enjoyed this.  It is a little cartoonish at times, but the main character has a well-developed character questioning the morality of the situation he is in.  It also has a snarky talking cat.  How can you not love that?

In the middle of the night, Coast Guard veteran Carl goes outside to fetch his possibly soon-to-be ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning cat, Princess Donut, which is up a tree.  Suddenly, every building within sight collapses into a pancake.  Only people who were outside at the time of the collapse survived.  The two enter a stairwell down which takes them into a dungeon, complete with exploding goblins, maniacal llamas, and goo slugs.  They find out they are in an RPG game along with all the other survivors of Earth.  It’s run by aliens and broadcast throughout the galaxy to trillions of viewers.  But this reality game show has a twist: when players die, they really die.  And if anyone survives all the way to level 18, that person will inherit the Earth.

While this book is really fun, it’s also quite gruesome.  Yeah, there’s gore, but the really unsettling part is that players die by the millions.  Also, some of the monsters were originally humans or aliens from a previous season.  There’s one particularly rough scene where Carl and Princess Donut are trying to kill a particularly horrifying and dangerous monster when Carl realizes it’s a woman begging for her life in Spanish.  At one point Carl and Donut come across a group of people from a senior nursing home who survived the apocalypse because their home was on fire.  They join the home’s four employees in trying to keep them alive until they can level up in level 3 and gain some powers.  I was surprised and impressed by these scenes.  Dinniman did a great job of integrating Carl’s morality into his situation.  It’s not just any action-adventure story.  It has heart.  Specifically, Carl has heart.

Princess Donut is also great.  Rather than just being categorized as a pet to Carl’s character, she gains the ability to speak, as well as special powers.  She becomes a playing character.  Dinniman keeps Donut in the mindset of a cat while still acquiring some human emotion.  She has many funny scenes in dialogue with Carl, namely whenever she references other men who come over when Carl is at work and moan and growl with his girlfriend behind closed doors.  She has no idea that she’s making Carl more miserable than the potentially fatal RPG situation he’s in.  

Another funny and gut-wrenching scene is when the two are pulled out for interviews, just like the behind the scenes interviews on shows like Survivor and American Idol.  While funny, they give Carl more opportunity to feel icky about his task at hand, i.e., killing to survive.  Note that there are a lot of funny scenes, but this aspect of Carl’s personality makes him much more three dimensional than your average action hero.

I’m going with five stars out of five on this book, only because it is so original to me, and as a DnD player, I could immerse myself in the story and into Carl’s character.  The action is fast paced, the writing is very readable, and the world building is marvelous.  Friends had been telling me I had to read this series.  I’m glad I finally did, even though it was for my online book club.  Now I’ve got to figure out how to fit the next seven books in the series into my ever-expanding TBR list.