Book Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman ★★⯪☆☆

To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys.

The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people to play The Hunger Games, while a Twitch streamer narrates the action.

The protagonists in Andy Weir's books are boys who know enough science to save the day. The ones in Scalzi's books have enough pop-culture knowledge to save the day. Dinniman's has played enough loot-box gatcha RPGs to save the day.

It is mostly pretty good fun. The tropes are goofy, the gore is splattertastic and only rarely ventures into torture porn, the villains are suitably campy, and the wisecracking sidekick doesn't become too annoying.

But the prose…

Here's a classic scene from Red Dwarf which exemplifies the major problem I had with this book.

There's only so many times you can read "Then I severed a +3 damage with poison debuff while he raised a +1 shield and used his armour of holding to neutralise the attack". I find opening endless lootboxen a chore when I'm playing a game - reading 150 instances of "I got a bronze box with a cauldron of Mafeking, then a gold box with an enchanted ring, then…" just becomes tiresome.

I tried listening to the audiobook of the sequel and I just couldn't get past the endless recitation of lists about +5 to elbows and -6 to arseholes. Just unbearably tedious.

Look, I've never written a novel and doubt I could do any better. This has obviously found its fanbase but, regrettably, I'm not one. It was a fun enough read, but I'm not sure I can be bothered with a dozen more sequels of recycled plots and repetitive squishing of cackling enemies.