Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Publisher – Its complicated

Published - it’s complicated

Price - don’t waste your money

You know what's worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what's worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That's what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world--or just get to the next level--in a video game-like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that's actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain't your ordinary game show.

I like a shortlist. I like having a chance to debate what is or is not a great book. A good shortlist can surprise you and make you find that book you’ve been meaning to read or perhaps discover a new trend or movement in the genre. The Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel published last year in the UK has I’ve found always been an intriguing guide. I don’t always agree with the eventual winner, but I tend to see where they’re coming from and usually enjoy most of the books. Hence I was intrigued that Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman had got on the shortlist.

I knew very little about this book going in. Primarily I heard this was litRPG. A genre based around role-playing games. Characters gain skills and powers as they progress in the story, and I heard that the novels were a) humourous and b) a bit repetitive. That is fine I’m not a game player, I’m always wary of humour in a story matching my unique sense of humour and I increasingly don’t read many long-running series. I was leaving this alone more as it was just not my thing by the sound of it. It sounded harmless and I’ve a TBR pile with plenty to get through. But the Clarke’s shortlist? Well that suggests this book has done something interesting to attract its attention. The question I then wanted to know the answer to is what? While initially I was hopeful this soon became Gentle Reader one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I’ve ever had in quite some time.

Some caveats first based on things I have learnt. I read the ebook which may be slightly different to the UK hardback. My cursory glance at a shop copy this weekend though suggested that things I disliked are in that book too. There is also a well-received audio version too I however am just going by the words on the digital page. That’s my preferred novel format.

The central story is pretty simple. Carl is a Coastguard and one cold wintry night realises his ex-girlfriend’s cat Donut has got out of the apartment window. Carl exits the window in boxer shorts to retrieve Donut and then watches from a tree while the world collapse as buildings and their occupants are squashed and killed across the planet. Suddenly a voice tells people they have entered a game and to have a chance of survival they must enter the dungeon portals or try to survive a world with very little left. Carl and Donut go down into the depths, and they immediately find themselves battling goblins. They are now part of a vast ancient intergalactic tournament as players called Crawlers who must make their way to the end of the Dungeon several layers down to survive. Carl learns some skills, Donut learns to talk and both realise they are now being watched by trillions of people across the universe. They must not be just survivors and capable fighters with magic, technology and their bare fists or claws they also need to be entertaining.

Shall we talk about what I liked? The first few pages are engaging, mildly humorous and there are brief moments of some satire about corporations and elites ruling over everyone else. It is all fairly simplistic  and to be fair not things you will not have seen in anything from say The Running Man to The Hunger Games. The idea of the main character accompanied by a talking cat to battle monsters is amusing in theory. The cat clearly thinks they should be in charge and the two make a squabbling double act. Again, nothing particularly new here but that all sounds fairly harmless? Yes?

I think that’s enough faint praise as fundamentally this book fails for me technically and makes a range of hugely questionable storytelling choices. At a fairly basic level Dinniman for me in this story is quite a turgid writer. For an alleged light comedy, the pace of the 440 pages is glacial. The end of the earth and the game tutorial to explain the plot moves at a snail’s pace to around a quarter of the book. This is not helped by most of the said tutorial being a fairly flat style of monotonous infodumps. We will be told a creature name, origin, points level, capabilities and weaknesses in detail. Apparently, the aim is to imitate an RPG instruction manual. Now call me a LitRPG novice but I still think dialogue in any books regardless of their assigned sub-genre label should perhaps still move a reader, make the reader feel and experience the world rather than just be a knowledge base. A skilled writer across any genre can tell me the things I need to know with style or at the very least make the words sound interesting. Ultimately if I wanted to read a dry as dust RPG textbook I’d had read that instead. The science fiction of dry explanation without craft is very old hat for a good reason.

But hold on it is based on video games that must mean some action right? Sadly Dinniman is also not a very good writer in this story when it comes to writing action scenes. The scenes go for pyrotechnics and bloody violence but more often I found them barely competent and lacking structure or drama. Carl is very quickly pretty indestructible and so there is very little sense of jeopardy. Huge set pieces hence fall flat, feel clunky and lack urgency for the most part. It meanders more than moves at pace. By the end bar one cat who now talks I feel there is a lack of actual development. Levels are beaten we move onto I suspect more of the same next time when Volume 2 starts. Levelling up in a video game often feels earned by the player with a sense of achievement this feels like you’re playing on easy mode.

As a novel I feel the book doesn’t really deliver that much either structurally or in character development to make me feel it achieved anything particularly outstanding. Character wise Carl is quite bland. I was a little puzzled how a 27-year-old is however made out to be huge fan of 80s film and tv shows such as Knight Rider and the A-Team which I can’t help think is the sign of an older author rather than an explainable character trait and it is one of many things that really pulls me out of the story as it makes little sense.  I can’t speak for how representative this book is of LitRPGs but I can say nearly all science fiction books I read manage to do better than this at creating characters that I actually care about.

I am always wary of discussing humour in a story. It’s a thing I very much warn book review requestors that I will not want to read and that is because so much of humour is subjective and not much works for me. People may like body humour and crude jokes. Hey Shakespeare did too so I tend to say that’s fine but it’s not for me. What I can say is I found the humour here incredibly laboured. Carl gets loot after every and a sarcastic AI explains the prize and the snarky explanations get repetitive. Nothing feels like it’s evolving or actually reacting to changes in the story. We’ll get more into his later but for me there was a moment quite early on that in normal circumstances I’d have close my copy and moved on. Carl gets a garment of some alleged protection described firstly like a cheap batman costume. However, Donut then says a few pages later of it “Nor am I wearing a cloak that makes me look like I won a participation trophy at the special needs comic con”.

Now if you’re going to write an ableist joke in the 2020s then I think the author needs a damn good reason for doing so. Does this get by the way reproached by Carl? No. is this an intriguing but disturbing aspect of Donut’s character that the book foreshadows for later in the book? No. At such a point while perhaps this set up a later volume, I have to say it just feels here a depressing poor taste joke that is unnecessary – you could have easily disparaged the costume without attacking those with special needs. Satire isn’t supposed to punch down. This does.

Later on, we will briefly meet a character called Chris and be told “They put him in a special school because he never spoke. But he’s not dumb. He does talk. Think of him as Silent Bob. If he says something you better listen” so clearly Dinniman isn’t fully ableist hey he just has characters with special needs but also special abilities to help the plot later, I suspect in later books (it did make me feel that the 1980s are calling). Overall, I had more laughs in my last root canal than reading this book (I have a friendly dentist).

Far more concerning issues though really made me come to really dislike this book. The lack of women in the story is quite noticeable bar a talking cat. Indeed, the first woman we really meet in the dungeon is a corpse. Carl finds the naked body of an Asian woman and the description lingers ‘That’s when I saw it. A gunshot wound, right in her chest between her breasts, right in the middle of a moth tattoo” It feels a little gratuitous but then the next human female character to arrive is a Spanish speaking woman turned by the Dungeon’s power that be into a 15-foot woman non-English speaking (also her huge breasts also get mentioned) that shoots dangerous cockroaches. Carl and Donut must battle her and to give Dinniman credit I found this scene rather horrific. The woman speaks desperate words in Spanish, Carl realises she was human but then he goes and must kill her brutally. Then we swiftly move onto another chapter and move on altogether from this. The Hunger Games I can’t help noticing actually showed a person’s horror at delivering violence and death. I think a good author could really make this a key turning point of the story. A horror writer would perhaps show Carl’s descent into becoming a villain, a true satire would have used the gallows humours of a desperate person made to do horrific things for ratings but here…nothing is done with it. Another character who makes a brief appearance is “ A round Hispanic woman – Yolanda Martinez” she doesn’t really do much after that but in a set piece she meets a particularly visceral end. Out of nowhere Carl then gives us a few bits of backstory on Yolanda after her death so we may want to try and feel something. I can’t help noticing a trend then that women , particularly those non-white or non-English speaking meet a bad ending in this book. To be fair I don’t think Dinniman is acting out his right wing fantasies, but I can’t help noticing our white male hero goes through unscathed, pretty much like Wolverine being able to selfheal while the women do not.

There are strands of plot trying to show us this corporation is the real racist power but as this trend developed and how little agency the non-Carl characters get in the story I found disquieting. They’re the kind of poor choices we saw in many books until the early 2000s and rightly people have called them out that I wasn’t seeing them that much anymore. This has made all the same mistakes and in 2026 I feel you can’t give an author a pass allowing them into a piece of work. Stories attacking evil corporations have been around a long time so one doesn’t cancel out the other.

There was a moment I thought oooh Dinniman is actually going to attempt satire. We find an evil Crawler and it turns out he is an ICE agent! We see this very bad guy take down immigrants before the disaster and then focus on hurting the weak Crawlers in the dungeon to gain power. But Dinniman then seems to pull back and actually this character is instead labelled true evil not just already because of the various people that he murdered but that he murders his own daughter. Satire missed once again.

Over time we see the dungeon crawler body count fall from 13 million to far far less and Dinniman really fails multiple to make that number change impactful for Carl or the reader. Add this on top of the above deaths and this overall lack of any real social commentary means it for me is not a satire that I would recognise as a either a particularly good or effective one

Here, we have a book that fails for me as a work of fiction, is fairly derivative to the point of being out of date when it comes to science fiction and ethically incredibly dubious. I found it mediocre, unfunny and a painfully unpleasant read. In normal circumstances I’d had bailed out quite early on at the ablism joke, but I was keen to see what exactly of merit was it that our Clarke jury members saw in it, and I found absolutely nothing to redeem it. I don’t think this book is particularly deep, so the problems I saw are fairly easy to spot if you pay attention to the words so I’ve no idea why this book gets a pass on them. I do not find this book in any way award worthy. I did not find this book one that I could at all recommend to anyone and I instead ultimately think this was a fairly rancid read. What happens next to Carl I care not but my time crawling in the dungeons is at an end…thankfully.