Dungeon Crawler Carl
What starts as a bad breakup, with Carl left minding his ex-girlfriend's insufferably regal show cat, Princess Donut, quickly spirals into something far more catastrophic. An alien invasion reduces every man-made structure on Earth to rubble, and the surviving humans are conscripted into a sadistic intergalactic reality show staged inside a trap-laden fantasy dungeon. Ratings matter. Survival, rather grimly, does not. Coast Guard veteran Carl and the imperious Princess Donut must claw their way through exploding goblins, magical potions, and (yes, genuinely) drug-dealing llamas, all while keeping a galaxy-wide audience entertained enough to let them live another day. It's absurd. It's gory. It's oddly moving in places it has absolutely no business being. Matt Dinniman's novel sits at a delirious crossroads of sci-fi, fantasy, and pitch-black survival comedy. It borrows the mechanics of LitRPG fiction, levelling up, stat checks, dungeon floors, and turns them into something with genuine wit and unexpected emotional weight beneath the carnage. Praise has come in thick and fast from some heavy-hitting names. Felicia Day called it 'fresh, creative, hilarious.' Scott Lynch noted, with characteristic flair, that it has 'no goddamn business burying so much depth and emotion under its bawdy, gory surface.' The Wall Street Journal described it as 'often laugh-out-loud funny.' High company for a book about a man and a cat trying not to get killed on alien television. If you're after something that's funny, propulsive, and stranger than you'll expect, this is well worth your time.
- Author: Matt Dinniman
- Publisher: Michael Joseph
- Genre: Fantasy
- ISBN: 978-0241816271
- Pages: 464 pages