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A Hilarious, Action-Packed Thrill Ride!
Format: Hardcover, Format: Hardcover
A Coast Guard veteran and all around good guy, Carl, lives in an apartment with his ex-girlfriendโs cat, Princess Donut. On a cold, winter night, Donut slips out of a window and gets stuck up a tree. And itโs a good thing she does! Wearing nothing but a jacket, boxers, and a pair of slippers that donโt fit, Carl goes outside to try to coax her down. Heโs just about retrieved the cat, and then it happens.
The whole world is changed. In the blink of an eye, every building, car, and piece of technology on the planet is flattened. Smooshed. Gone. A bodiless voice announces that anyone who doesnโt want to live off whatever is left on the planet will need to enter stairs. Carl and the cat do so, and thatโs when the fun starts.
It seems the galaxy has had a long-running and massively popular television program that follows โdungeon crawlsโโclassic role-playing/video game scenarios where adventurers go into a medieval dungeon, explore, fight monsters, win treasure, gain experience, become more powerful, and then proceed to deeper, harder levels. Earth has been selected to serve as the setting for the current season. Thatโs right. The Earth has been destroyed for the sake of a galactic television game. By entering the stairwell, Carl, Donut, and a couple million other humans have become participants in this game. Instead of remaining a pet, Donut is made into a fellow โcrawler,โ like Carl. She can speak, and reason, and fightโall with the personality one would expect from a cat named Princess Donut
The rules to this galactically televised dungeon crawl are intricate. But essentially, Carl and Donut begin to mentally see stat screens, just like in an RPG video game: health, various skills, their strength, dexterity, intelligence, and constitution. In classic 80โs kids Dungeons & Dragons style, they have unlimited encumbrance, meaning they can carry anything they can pick up, file it away in โinventory,โ and pull it up whenever needed. Theyโre on level 1 of this seasonโs crawl, a classic dungeon with tunnels, doors, chambers, and monstersโlots of different monsters. Thereโs a countdown running, so they only have so many days to find a set of stairs that will lead them down to the next, harder level. And if they donโt find the stairs before the timer runs out, the level theyโre on will collapse. Thereโs all sorts of lethal dangers awaiting the crawlers. And thatโs what takes up the bulk of the book.
There are daring encounters, puzzles to sort through, and lots and lots of monsters to fight. In each encounter, the reader is given real time stats of the characters. After their initial shock, Carl and Donut slowly form an endearing partnership, one that proves quite successful in this dangerous game theyโre forced to play.
Iโll confess for the first quarter of the book, I was skeptical. It felt an awful lot like one of my kids watching someone else playing a video game (which is something I donโt really understand). But Matt Dinniman does a masterful job of weaving in enough subplotsโboth inside and outside the dungeonโso that both a cohesive story and genuine character development emerge from all the excitement of fighting kobolds, or rigging goblin explosives, or figuring out how to slay a โbig bossโ monster that vaguely resembles a cat-hoarding old lady. Thereโs depth to this dungeon.
And of course thereโs action. Itโs compelling, page-turning, fun. And funny. Dinniman has a sharp, occasionally crass, often dark sense of humor and he knows how to use it in all the right places. Thereโs snark, and absurdity, and physical comedy, and some snort-through-your nostrils lines. Think of a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign melded with a Hitchhikerโs Guide to the Galaxy vibe thatโs centered around a likable hero and a hilariously self-absorbed cat.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely be pursuing the series. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2025