Dungeon Crawler Carl
Matt Dinniman
2020 – Amazon Self Publishing/2024 – Ace Publishing
Anyone who knows me well knows I am picky about my RPGs. Unlike most nerds who picked up dice to spend hours in a basement eating chips and sucking down Cactus Cooler and sour gummi worms while arguing about cool powers, I did not cut my TTRPG gamer chops on Dungeons and Dragons. Rather, I got sucked into the allure of Vampire: The Masquerade. I think this was for multiple reasons: vampires are cool, and I hate both math and game mechanic. Consequently, I have always leaned more into storytelling games than mechanic heavy games, so World of Darkness, Fate, and other low stakes games have intrigued me far more than the stats heavy D&D set. And while I do love video games (ask me about my love of Assassin’s Creed), I usually am not that person calculating my stats so I can KILL THE BIG BOSS! It’s not my style. I get for many, that’s the fun part of the game, but I care much more about the stories, the relationships between characters, and occasionally being cool enough to kick ass and take names.
So it was with some trepidation I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl. I was very curious because I had heard so many of my friends – all video and TTRPG gamers – rave about it. Still, I know me, I know what I am like when it comes to mechanic, strategy, and the ticky details of RPG gameplay. But I went in with an open mind, because expanding my literary intake beyond academic works and trashy fanfic is something I am trying to actively engage in. Try something outside of my comfort zone.
Our tale begins with Carl, an average guy, living in Seattle, Washington, with his girlfriend, Beatrice, and her prize-winning Persian show cat, Princess Donut. While Beatrice is everything you would expect of a woman who owns a prize-winning, expensive show cat to be, Carl is ex-military, having served in the Coast Guard, and he uses his skills now to work on the odd electrical job, such as repairing boats. A tall, buff dude, Carl is at his heart an everyman, a guy who likes to kick back, have a beer, and play video games on the couch with his girlfriend’s cat.
That all changes on New Year’s Eve. While Beatrice is off in the Bahamas with her friends, Carl is back in cold, slushy Seattle. He’s discovered pictures of Bea hanging on another guy and suspects infidelity, and that leads him to an uneasy sleep. When a bad dream wakes him, he reaches for a cigarette, leaving the window open to let the smoke out. Princess Donut leaps out into the snow. Knowing the kind of hell he will catch for allowing Bea’s prize-winning cat outside, he slips on his coat, Bea’s crocs, and nothing else – no pants over his boxers, no proper shoes, and wanders into the cold to get Donut. Just as he manages to snag her, however, the whole world disappears in the blink of an eye. Every building is sucked downward, into the center of the earth, crushing and killing people and animals in its wake. Before Carl can process any of it, an alien voice announces that the Earth is being liquidated and turned into a dungeon-crawling game show. Those creatures that survived must get into the dungeon in order to save themselves, but even then, the threat isn’t over. Once inside, Carl learns that the remnants of Earth are confined in a multi-layer survival game, part of a reality television competition beamed across the galaxy as part of a profit scheme between a mining company and a television production. The crawlers are forced to go through the video-game like dungeon, facing untold and horrific dangers and engaging in mind-numbing violence just to survive each level of the dungeon. If they do, they may get a chance to go down another level. If not, after the time limit is up, anyone left will be crushed to death as the level collapses.
Carl and Donut manage to make it down and into a training guild, run by Mordecai, a crawler from a previous season long ago, who has lost his family, his original race, and his planet to these very corporations that sponsor this game. He has agreed to indentured servitude, training other crawlers, like Carl and Donut, in the hopes of gaining some freedom someday. He aids Carl as he learns about his stats and the system that runs the game – much of the “gameplay” feels like a video game or RPG. Additionally, Donut is “awakened” when she receives a pet treat that makes her self-aware and reveals her intelligence and inherent threat – not to mention her sociability and “cute” factor. Now understanding her past and what has happened, she realizes she has to rely on Carl, as much as he has to rely on her, in order to survive. As the pair wander through the maze, they engage with horrors, find ridiculous situations, fight a host of mind-bending, semi-fantastical creatures, meet other crawlers like them, just trying to survive, and manage to make it to the second and third levels. Along the way, Donut finds she has empathy and trust in Carl, and that she has a skill set all her own. Carl, for all of his frustration with Donut, realizes just how attached he is to his ex-girlfriend’s cat. He also reveals himself not only as a strong, one-punch sort of fighter, but a keen strategist, a capable engineer, and a creative wild-card when the chips are down. With grit and resolve, Carl and Donut plow through the dungeon levels, determined to make it to the other side. If only Carl could get pants…and maybe some shoes…
This book surprises you. Carl at first comes off as an everyman meathead; a guy who likes the gym, mindless video game violence, and and 80s action movies and television shows. But underneath it all, there is hidden depth to our hero. He references a tough upbringing as a child, and there is more than a hint of loneliness about Carl. He feels like he was abandoned and thrown away, and this perhaps explains so much of Carl’s actions in the story. He refuses to throw anyone else away, sometimes to the point of danger. Everyone from Donut to a group of senior citizens who survived their nursing home collapse come under his wing, and he tries, desperately, to ensure as many of them survive this crazy, cruel situation as he can. As his journey progresses, we see him struggle with the very real ethical conundrums he is facing in this mad hellscape – the fact he has to fight and kill in order to survive, that it requires a level of ruthlessness and brutality, and that often times you have to weigh the the cost of one life against another in ways that are not easy or fair. Bit by bit, Carl feels the pieces of his humane self crumble under the mind-boggling violence, terror, fear and anxiety, all while he sinks of the despair of the dehumanization he feels as a “contestant” in a game show for other people’s mindless consumption. It is as if his struggle to survive as a person does not matter when it comes to the masses and the will of the corporations that feed that consumption.
However, the highlight of this book, for me, was the relationship between Carl and Donut. It is here that we see Carl’s most humane side. Donut, newly awakened and trying to grapple with her awareness, the game, and all of her worst tendencies as a cat, must learn how to cooperate with her person’s ex-boyfriend if she wants to survive. There are moments when she is selfish, childish, and vain, as one would expect of a cat, but especially a princess like Donut. But there are moments when she is insightful, wise, and truly caring of Carl and his feelings. It is one of these moments that she reveals she is aware that Carl had thought of moving out of Bea’s apartment and taking Donut with him, because underneath all of his gruff exterior, he does love and care for this cat, an animal he knows Bea will throw away when Donut is too old to show anymore. It is that attachment between the two, the platonic love of an animal and her human, that gives so much heart to this story. Carl is less alone with Donut in his life, and Donut has someone who will always ensure she is safe, and the pair make a formidable and inspiring team, bringing together others who have been left behind, struggling to survive.
All of that said, I feared the game mechanic of it all would get me, and indeed it did. Perhaps it is just my predisposition talking, I own it, but game mechanic part of the story was the one part I hated. Once game stats were involved, I found myself longing to skip them. Between the crazed AI and its increasingly insane sense of humor and they discussions and strategizing over powers, potions, and buffs, I found myself quickly bored, wanting to skip to the more “story” part of the chapter. I realize that this adds to the setting and world building, I get it, and that this disinterest is frankly a me thing. Most of you wouldn’t mind it, but it always felt jarring, pulling away to detached conversations on how to order spells and which potions to take when to increase your healing factors, blah, blah. For any of you who have ever had to sit in on your friends merding game mechanic and found it all above your head and boring, yeah, you feel what I am getting at.
Also, I am not a fan of ultra violence. Just am not. I play video games, and I acknowledge, there is a commentary going on here about the violence of imaginary worlds vs. real experience vs. reality gameshows that put their contestants through hell for entertainment, but yeah, I got squicked in several places. And I plan violent games! Just…yeah, it’s a me thing, I know, these are all quibbles at the end of the day that relate to very specific gripes of mine, not the quality of the book.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a heart-thumping, insane, pedal-to-the-metal romp in a post-apoclyptic hellscape where the stakes are real, even if it is hard to wrap your head around that. As a whole, the book has a lot of sharp commentary on our entertainment and capitalist society, underscoring both our obsession with fictional violence, video games, reality television, and capitalism at the expense of humanity, not to mention our addiction to the para-social relationships of social media. It’s brilliant, insightful, and darkly funny. Carl and Donut are a team with a lot of heart, and they make you love the ancillary characters they run into as well. While the book bogged down for me when we got to game mechanic, stats, and the ultra-violence, I can see how these things add to the world building of Carl’s ridiculous situation, and it adds to the meta-commentary that Dinniman is getting at. This is a richly layered, bonkers, disgusting, but heartfelt and melancholy story, with greed, ambitious, hubris, and indifference all mixed with heart, humanity, and hope. For all you fellow nerds out there rolling dice and picking up game controls, this is a perfect read.