I was first introduced to Dungeon Crawler Carl by my wife, squealing with delight and laughter at a dozen hilarious things in the first couple chapters. I was a little hard of a sell for her as I think that a lot of these “normal white redditor-style human gets transferred to video game irl” tend to be very fappy and poorly written. Add in that it’s self-published and that’s a recipe for disaster in my book. The first few chapters of DCC seemed to support this: Carl is unlucky in love, a veteran, “no nonsense,” and his most applicable skill to the story is he’s played a ton of video games and understands the mechanics. If that all doesn’t sound very appealing to you, please trust me when I say: this book exceeded my expectations, sucked me in, and now I own all seven of them.
There are a couple things that make Dungeon Crawler Carl work. The first one is Princess Donut, Carl’s talking show cat and party magic user. Donut is hilarious, full stop. If you like cats you will adore her, as it’s clear Matt Dinniman is a cat person and poured his love of the animals into this story. Donut is pampered, clever, and utterly distractible. She and Carl are also all each other has anymore, which means this is a genuinely affectionate relationship with real stakes. Truly, it’s the heart of the story.
I suppose at some point I should talk about what actually happens in the story: Carl is outside chasing Princess Donut when suddenly, the world is flattened. Literally. Everything goes squish, and a disembodied voice tells everyone who survived to “enter the dungeon,” indicating an opening. Carl enters with Donut, and they are shortly briefed on the tutorial of how to survive an intergalactic game show where a planet is liquidated, a massive dungeon is constructed with the planet’s resources, and the survivors are forced to dungeon crawl. Donut eats a magical pet biscuit which makes her sentient, and they begin leveling up and looking for the stairs to the next level before level 1 collapses. The creatures are unique though flavored by things anyone who likes MMOs and Bethesda-style RPGs will recognize, and the AI who runs the simulation is absolutely hilarious, being cruel but witty, and sporting a foot fetish that keeps Carl barefoot throughout the story. The humor is very tropey and pulls heavily on popular culture, which I think means the story will ultimately age poorly, but that doesn’t mean millennials won’t always harbor a soft spot for it, nor does it mean this isn’t a fun jaunt.
Next, a common thing in these stories is to immediately find some ingenue so that the male lead can Finally Have Sex. This doesn’t happen. Instead, Carl finds a group of elderly people who also entered the dungeon, having been outside for a fire drill when the liquidation happened. This was the final turning point for me. We see a heroic side of Carl, but more importantly, he interacts with a handful of nurses and medical aides who didn’t question helping their wards for even a moment. Instead, they went into action mode, and have been surviving the dungeon with a gaggle of blue hairs in tow. It’s a beautiful nod to how I think care workers would actually behave in a scenario like this, and it’s in my opinion a sign of what makes Carl work in ways no similar works do.
As a final note, something my wife pointed out: there’s no rape. not even a mention of it. In male power fantasy stories like this that is so, so common and it’s barely ever handled well. At best, it’s used to fuel Manly Rage. At worst, the woman is treated as a possession and the act is meant to degrade and punish her without any regard to how it impacts her. Berserk is a great example of how not to handle this subject well. The story tosses sexual violence around like trading cards, and while I think the story is enough to where I have read it all in spite of the gratuitous torture, rape, and violence, I do not recommend it to anyone without making sure they understand all of this. That DCC has none of this means I can recommend it whole heartedly, and I do!