(This blog post contains slight spoilers for Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 1.)
It feels like the popularity of this series came out of nowhere and completely blindsided me. Sure, I’d seen the book advertised numerous times at a Barnes and Noble many times, and I even picked it up and read the blurb on the back. “This seems decent.” I remember thinking to myself, and promptly put it back on the display.
A couple weeks ago, a Discord group I’m in just out of nowhere brought it up. Suddenly half the group was talking about how they’re all completely obsessed with this series and started sharing fan art and talking about how obsessed they were with it and all these things. I swear to you, no one I knew even knew this existed, so it seemed really bizarre to me for this to just happen. I even asked another friend of mine who loves reading more than me about it and he told me the same thing how the obsession from everyone seemed to come out of nowhere. He also had a friend beg him to read it and they entered a “trade” where he’d read it if his friend in turn read something he chose.
I mentioned to the group that I’d seen it advertised a lot and I thought it seemed neat. Suddenly I got most of the group jumping up and down (Or, well, they were in my mind. We’re in a Discord group so it’s not like I could see them. Work with me on this okay?) and telling me I absolutely should, one of them even posting a Simpsons “Join ussss” gif.
The next time my fiance and I were out, I decided I was gonna bite the bullet and try it. At this point I was kind of apprehensive about it because I had really high expectations, which I hate approaching anything with, as it clouds my ability to enjoy it in a lot of cases. Like when everyone talks up something about how great it is, there’s like an expectation that you have to enjoy it, and if you don’t, telling them you didn’t makes you feel like you’re disappointing them, or that you feel like you missed something, even though you just…didn’t enjoy it the way they did. It’s irrational, and you know that, but you just can’t shake it once it takes hold.
When we walked into the Half-Price Books, it was like the universe was aware of what I was doing, because smack in the center aisle, facing the front door, Dungeon Crawler Carl sat, staring at me and my fiance. We went to the stand and my fiance (smartly) told me to grab one of the ones under the pile since the one on display probably gets touched and picked up and messed with the most since it’s the one at the front. I finished up Redwall (The first book, Redwall, not the entire series. You know what I mean.) and immediately leaped into this book, expectations high.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is pretty dang good.
The story revolves around Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut, as the world around them unexpectedly falls to ruin in the blink of an eye. They see a staircase materialize and choose to descend it, unbeknownst to them entering a dungeon where the entire galaxy will watch them try to fight and survive.
Matt Dinniman, the author, does a fantastic job with the setup and the pacing. Throughout the entire book, he manages to keep it interesting and pretty fast paced. The opening prologue doesn’t take long before the action starts, and you’re fed the information you need to know, while little bits and pieces of Carl’s backstory and such are scattered through the rest of the book at proper moments.
Just as the main characters are hurled through the story, so too is the reader, but Dinniman does an excellent job choosing the proper moments for when to slow down and explain things through other characters. While it can be somewhat overwhelming, it also helps if you understand the basic concepts of Tabletop Role-Playing Game or video game mechanics, as this book doesn’t shy away from jargon used in those. The intended audience seems to be those in the “nerd” culture, but even if you don’t know the terminology and such, there’s enough context clues and enough is explained that I think even someone without prior knowledge will understand what’s being said.
As I started to read more of the story, I realized that the format of it is less Dungeons and Dragons and more Sword Art Online. Sure, the mechanics and races and all of that are D&D, but the concept of the dungeon seems almost entirely in parallel to Sword Art Online. In the book, the objective is to level up and reach the final floor to secure your freedom in order to escape the dungeon. Sword Art Online is in the same vein where characters are trapped in a virtual video game and the only way to escape is for someone to clear the top floor of that games dungeon, while death in the game means dying in real life.
To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this comparison at all; it’s more of an observation. Lots and lots of works are in many ways derivative of other things, and it would only be a problem if it were a one-to-one copy, but it very clearly isn’t. As long as they’re doing something unique with the idea, then in my opinion, it’s perfectly fine. I also think the same thing applies to tropes as well. I don’t care if a trope is used, I care about how it’s used. There’s a major difference, and in reality, it’s almost impossible to avoid using a trope in some form anyway.
With all of this said, you might notice I said the book is just “pretty dang” good. While that’s kinda vague, I had one major hangup with the story that is also a major part of it.
I’m really mixed about the humor in the book.
Leaning into its absurd premise, the novel also leans heavily into its humor, going out of its way to crack jokes almost every page. The humor is…well…I don’t know what you’d call it, but the only thing I can think to call it is “stupid humor”. in addition to the absurd premise, the novel has things such as fire breathing llamas that also carry meth on them, goblins who then go on a “drug war” against the llamas because they want the meth, and so forth. Essentially, it feels like something a 14 or 15 year old might come up with and write, and while it’s explained in the story about the aliens grossly misunderstanding the Earth and its culture, it’s…still humor that seems like it was written by a 14 or 15 year old.
There’s also an AI in the book who writes descriptions for items the characters pick up and almost every single time, I just rolled my eyes at them. Funnily enough, that’s supposed to be the point, and Carl even comments on this a few times, but at the same time it feels like it’s supposed to be funny for the sake of the reader, which means that even though it has precedence in the world, it’s still written with an almost meta intention, so even with the justification, I still groaned at almost every single one. A lot of the humor and writing also leans very heavily on references to real world media, with shows such as Cops or Judge Judy getting a mention. There’s even a few YouTube videos mentioned as well, and while this is probably a result of this book being extremely modern, the mentioning of these felt a bit weird to me. Humor like this only lands if you know the reference, and if you don’t you just kinda go, “…Huh?” It reminded me of the main problem I had with the Super Mario Galaxy Movie of all things.
At its absolute worst, the humor is insulting, and there were a couple of special needs jokes that I absolutely didn’t appreciate. Those jokes are never funny, full stop. I had to put the book down for a second after reading one of them and it admittedly soured the book for me for a while, worried that it was going to be like that the whole time. Having grown up as a special needs kid, it’s especially frustrating because I already got put through that whole ringer in school, and seeing it continue to happen even out of school, it’s pretty frustrating. I guess some people, even those with special needs, can look past or maybe even laugh at it, but I’m not one of those people.
Thankfully, it only happened the one time and while there was another similar, though less egregious, joke, it stopped after that. That’s the sort of fine line this humor has straddle, and ultimately, your enjoyment of this book is going to come down to how much you like this humor or at the very least tolerate it. Personally, I tolerated and pushed towards it because when Dinniman isn’t making jokes or references, the story is really engaging, and the characters are (mostly) charming and I look forward to seeing what they do or say next. Dinniman does an excellent job of setting stakes, and then releasing the tension, while also setting the stakes even higher the next time. He also does a lot of setup and world-building, which makes the idea of the next books even more exciting.
This is why I stuck to it and despite my frustrations found this a fun read. The premise makes it so that the further along the story goes because of the inherent danger of going deeper in the dungeon, the more expectations there are of what can happen. Because Dinniman makes the events of what happen on these early floors so intense, it means the later floors in the later books must be even more nuanced or exciting. Dinniman, despite the absurdity, is also oozing with creativity in this story, and it’s that creativity that had me hooked.
Dinniman also smartly doesn’t just make the story a straightforward one about survival; there’s a lot of things happening on the side, and those events directly affect the main characters, who are drip fed information and are left to speculation as to what things mean. This approach works well because it allows for anything to happen, and since the book is told purely in first person from Carl’s POV, what he learns is what we learn, and this decision to make it this perspective is smartly done.
That’s what makes this so frustrating though, is that this book IS smartly done. It’s just covered in a layer of humor that I generally don’t agree with or enjoy. While writing this, I realized that this book is a common storytelling method used especially in modern times. There’s a story that is ultimately supposed to be a serious tale with themes and symbolism, but it’s also wrapped in a huge layer of humor. One popular example I can think of in regards to this is the game Undertale. That game is rife with silly humor at just about every turn, but underneath all of it is a story and characters with very real and very serious themes and emotions. While I enjoyed Undertale and its humor, I wonder if in some ways someone might feel the way about Undertale the same way I do about Dungeon Crawler Carl, where they find the underlying themes and characters endearing, but the humor is an annoyance. I suppose the opposite could also be true where people only view Undertale as a humorous game, but found the serious elements distracting or annoying.
This dichotomy of silly and serious meshed into one is also what makes it extremely hard to write for. If one element is more noted than the other, it can undermine the other element entirely. And if people are just going to favor one element over the other, it could be asked then what the point is of even having the other element at all. In addition, humor is probably one of the most subjective tastes out there, so it’s even more difficult to get something like this right. There’s a dangerous level as well where a serious scene might be completely ruined by an ill-timed joke as well, or even the opposite where characters are joking around and someone drops a serious topic out of nowhere. When handled poorly, this kind of thing can create an emotional whiplash, making you wonder how you’re supposed to feel, and at the worst of it, making light of topics for the sake of a joke that really shouldn’t be joked about at all.
But based on the popularity of this series, clearly he did something right for a lot of people. After reading this, I could see why it’s as popular and loved as much as it is. It feels like it was written by someone who grew up with internet culture and internet humor. A lot of modern young adults especially also grew up with this same culture, so it resonates heavily with them. This is not something someone over a certain age would enjoy, and it feels directly aimed at that audience beyond the RPG jargon and such.
Despite all of that, there were a few times the humor was genuinely funny, and the absurdity with the creativity made for a lot of amusing ideas. It’s just the underlying descriptions and unnecessarily crude additions such as lots of sex jokes or drugs were way too much and too frequent.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this hang up I have about the book, because at the end of the day, I really liked this book. The criticism I have with the humor is made more profound to me because of how much I ended up enjoying it. I was a bit hesitant to learn there’s already eight books in this series, despite the first one being published in 2020, but I’ve been reassured from fans that the story only gets better as it goes on, so I am generally excited to start the next one.
Glurp glurp!