It begins, like so many cataclysms, with bureaucratic chicanery.
After all of the buildings and structures on the planet Earth collapse into pancakes of condensed debris, a gigantic note appears in the sky, addressed to “Surviving Humans,” in which the following information is relayed:
Per Syndicate rules, subsection 543 of the Precious Elemental Reserves Code, having failed to file a proper appeal for mineral and elemental rights within 50 solars of first contact, your planet has been successfully seized and is currently being mined of all requested elemental deposits by the assigned planetary regent.
For Carl, a marine tech and former Coast Guard, the global catastrophe occurred at two in the morning in Seattle in the dead of winter, and the only reason he survived at all—the only reason he wasn’t indoors during the event—was that he was chasing his ex-girlfriend’s show cat named Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, who’d jumped out the window onto a tree. The survival of our everyman protagonist, then, was wholly coincidental.
All of the establishing circumstances of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl—the first in a series of (so far) eight novels about an intergalactic reality show called Dungeon Crawler World, watched by “quintillions of citizens of the Syndicate”—is deliberately paying homage to the gold standard of sci-fi satire, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, another fictional series that begins with the end of the world. In Adams’s seminal opening sequence, an everyman named Arthur Dent attempts to stop a construction crew from tearing down his house in order to build a highway bypass. But then his problem is magnified by a million when hundreds of alien spaceships suddenly surround the planet and inform its terrified occupants the following information:
As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.
Then, when humanity collectively freaks out at this news, the alien announcer admonishes them:
There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Both novels hinge on clerical semantics, stipulations decided upon by distant entities, unannounced deadlines, and obfuscatory technicalities—both in an arbitrary fifty-year window. This is the kind of language written by governments and corporations for the express purpose of presenting themselves as on the up and up while deviously creating situations that will financially indenture citizens and customers. Bureaucratic clauses like “you have 50 years to lodge a complaint otherwise we seized/destroy your planet” are not placed in contracts and covenants to ensure fairness or opportunity for dissent; rather, they are written to create the illusion of due diligence for a powerful institution to legally take any action they want.
In the universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide, what follows after the destruction of Earth is a galaxy-hopping adventure. In the Dungeon Crawler Carl universe, the remaining survivors are thrown into a dystopian reality show akin to The Running Man or The Hunger Games: Contests in which failing means dying. Dungeon Crawler World is a set of eighteen floors filled with monsters, goblins, and aliens of all stripes; traps, mazes, sudden shifts in the terrain; and open worlds in each level featuring thousands of NPCs, storylines, and quests. It’s an enormously valuable piece of intergalactic IP, so you can be certain whoever is in control has no incentive to allow the planets from which they steal their materials and themes for the show to advocate for their sovereignty.
Here is, in fact, how they ensure the outcome they’re aiming for. Carl and his fellow crawlers are given assistance by mentors in safe guild rooms. Carl and Princess Donut—who, it must be noted, gains sentience, the ability to speak, and a very haughty attitude via the alien tech of Dungeon World—learn the lay of the land from an NPC named Mordecai, who tells them how the Syndicate, a civilization made up of “over three billion independent star systems,” does their dastardly doings. Apparently human beings are merely one of six “seed species” the Syndicate uses to create the materials and the contestants of their show, which means the planning of Dungeon Crawler World seasons has been going on for millennia:
They find a compatible world, sprinkle the humans on there, wait a couple thousand years, and then reveal themselves to the largest settlement. They usually do this as soon as civilization starts to take hold, but long before any sort of industrial revolution. As long as there’s a working government, this counts as ‘First Contact.’ In a legal sense, I mean, which gives them leave to wait a couple thousand additional years, come back, and strip the planet dry.
The existence of humanity, then, is mere staging for a TV show, thematic fodder, and a small percentage of its population become unwitting participants. So much for the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran—the real text explaining our origins is fine print.
The monumental ethical violation that is Dungeon Crawler World is so fundamental to its essence that of course the Dungeon Crawler Carl series inevitably develops themes of resistance, defiance, and anti-authoritarian zeal. Carl and his fellow crawlers first must survive the terrifying gauntlet of dungeons—which understandably takes up most of their attention—but throughout these first three entries in the series, they’re also looking for cracks in the system, weaknesses in the showrunners, loopholes to be exploited, and any ways and means of tearing down the whole fucking thing.
One of the delights of Dungeon Crawler Carl is its unrepentant use of expletives. Or perhaps the better way to say it is that it’s one of the delights of the protagonist, Dungeon Crawler Carl sans italics. He says ‘fuck’ even more than I do, which, if you know, is a fucking lot. The reason I appreciate the rampant vulgarity is that it communicates to me the kind of audience this series seeks. Dinniman seems utterly uninterested in any readers who would balk at phrases like “Jesus fuck.” As Carl and Donut become two of the most watched contestants on the show, Carl becomes known for his signature line, “Goddamnit, Donut.”
In addition to the R-rated language is the gloriously over-the-top violence, which is cartoonish in the extreme but all the more engaging for being so. Tsunamis of blood and guts and entrails cascade through every environment. Equipped with all manner of video-game-style inventories like health potions, magic spells, and enhanced weapons, Carl and his cohort experience pain of any imaginable stripe. Prominent characters can die at any moment. Dinniman renders the game show just as villainously powerful as logic would dictate. The stakes are amplified by the ubiquitous bloodshed.
Both qualities—the language and the violence—combine to make this series refreshingly adult, which beyond the pleasures they bring also suggests an understanding of its potential readership—gamers, comic book nerds, sci-fi afficionados, anime fans, etc. These folks tend to find the PG-13-ification of popular entertainment—especially when it comes to adaptations from their fandom—with disappointment, as such a rating indicates compromise. Anyone watching the recent Street Fighter movie can attest to this kind of dilution. How the fuck can an adaptation of an ultraviolent fighting game receive the same rating as Mean Girls?
To recap thus far: the DCC series evinces an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian attitude that both aligns it with its literary predecessors and makes it hyper relevant to our current world; and it services its core audience by not shying away from aspects that might lower its potential sales and popularity.
These are admirable qualities, to be sure, but the real question is: Are these books good? If they are, what makes them good? And are they good beyond the parameters of their genre? Do they do more than tell an entertaining story?
The answer to all is a decided yes, and there’s a specific sequence from Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, the second in the series, that I want to use to illustrate Dinniman’s skillful plotting and his subtle political acumen.
In order to explicate this masterful sequence, I have to bring you up to speed on what leads up to it, because the set up actually occurs in the first book.
Since Dungeon Crawler World is such a blockbuster all over the galaxy, there are numerous subsidiaries to its success, one of which is an industry of talk shows discussing the reality series. The most popular is hosted by a hybrid creature named Odette, with whom Carl and Donut develop a good report. But they don’t always get to choose who they’re interviewed by, so on the second floor they’re thrust onto a grimy production called Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem, hosted by The Maestro, a nepo-baby orc whose royal parents foot the bill for his edgelord-style show in which a crowd of red-pilled preteen males chant “GLURP” at screens depicting cruelty and death.
Angry at being forced to go on such a pathetic program, Carl decides to thwart the Maestro’s televisional intentions in every way possible. You see, Carl and Donut establish themselves very early on as two of the most popular stars of this season of Dungeon Crawler World, meaning they hold a certain amount of leverage. They are more valuable alive and fighting than dead. Carl realizes how he can wield his relative power at those in charge: “I didn’t need to be stronger than him. Donut and I were something better. We were expensive.”
Carl ruins the planned segments of Death Watch Extreme Mayhem and humiliates The Maestro, who responds with all the maturity and tact we have come to associate with the privileged, by which I mean he yells and complains and pouts and promises vengeance.
Cut to the second volume, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. By now, Carl and Donut are on the third floor of the promised eighteen. As each floor carries its own themed narratives, our pair of heroes encounter a nasty, protracted battle with an evil circus of monsters, resulting in a climactic fight that leaves both Carl and Donut drenched in blood and guts. As they’re scheduled to appear on another talk show just moments after this battle concludes, Carl tells their media handler that he and Donut will need to clean up beforehand. Though the handler is annoyed at them, when they’re transferred to their holding trailer—which are usually nothing more than spare rooms—it’s a much nicer one than usual. Carl, in fact, has “the sense this one was normally used for dignitaries and non-crawlers,” which he realizes is the result of his and Donut’s urgent need to shower.
The show this time is called Danger Zone with Ripper, a panel discussion featuring, among others, a “pompous asshat” named Tucker (nice) and an extremely famous popstar named Manasa, who has some unique circumstances regarding her anatomy, as the show’s director points out: “The real Manasa perished long ago, but she contracted with the Valtay Corporation to keep her career going once she died.” Carl, who has been told about the Valtay system, knows that they are “little parasites that [take] over bodies,” meaning that Manasa “has a worm in her brain driving her body.”
During the show, the host informs Carl of what’s going on with the Skull Empire. The Maestro is actually—or, more accurately, was actually—a Prince of the Skull Empire, a powerful political entity that has recently experienced some unrest due, in part, to Carl humiliating the Maestro on his show. The Skull ruler King Rust “responded by disowning the Maestro and telling his people to shut the hell up.” The host asks Carl what me makes of all this.
Before answering, Carl thinks to himself: “All it takes is a little seed,” before launching into a rant about how if King Rust “treats his people like his son treats guests on his show, then they should rebel.” Tucker, the “asshat” with the “punchable face,” tells Carl that using such language on air is considered criminal.
Then, the studio is suddenly rattled by something powerful, and Manasa’s holograph (none of the guests are actually in the studio but rather remain in their trailers as their likenesses are transferred to set via imaging technology) blinks out and disappears. Her trailer, it turns out, has been destroyed by the Skull Empire, who proudly claim responsibility via The Maestro’s younger brother Prince Stalwart:
Citizens of the Syndicate. By the time this message hits the tunnel, the Earth creatures Carl and Donut will have been executed by a pulse fired from my personal yacht. The Skull Empire will pay for any damages to any private property destroyed in the attack. We are claiming, under the Syndicate rules regarding independent system sovereignty, that this summary execution is both justified and appropriate given Carl’s statements advocating sedition. That is all.
If the Skull’s aim was to kill Carl and Donut, why did they blow up Manasa’s trailer? As another guest explains, “Manasa had switched trailers…They said you needed cleaning facilities, and she offered to switch.”
Since Manasa was so valuable to the Valtay Corporation, they respond by destroying the “personal yacht” from which the Skulls fired their pulse, which, while not killing Prince Stalwart, apparently kills his wife and brother. This retaliation occurs despite the fact that the “Valtay and the Skull Empire are strong allies.” That’s how profitable an asset Manasa was the Valtay, they would violate a political coalition in response to her death. Two universal superpowers and former allies are turned against each other.
Carl, then, has both deliberately fed into and accidentally amplified a major intergalactic political incident from inside the dungeon. This is, first and foremost, a masterful orchestration of plot and story from Dinniman, who renders each of the elements that lead to this moment (stretched across two books, no less)—from the establishment of the talk-show circuit to the bloody battle that left Carl and Donut so gross they needed showers—so organically and independently that the final combination of these factors is surprising and delightful and, like all great and revelatory culminations of deftly weaved threads, feels like an inevitable result of those factors instead of the reason those factors were put in place.
Novelists have to push a block down a hill while convincing readers they’re rolling a ball instead. It’s a staggering feat to construct fictions of any complexity, but doing so on a scale the size of these Dungeon Crawler Carl books requires an endless series of overlapping, crisscrossing, and zigzagging components—some seemingly minor, like the introduction of a new skill or weapon someone acquires; others of obvious import like the death of major characters; and still others that are met with befuddlement from the characters—that pop up and disappear at appropriate moments, many of which won’t come to anything resembling fruition until many pages (or even books) later. Dinniman keeps track of these disparate narrative strategies and structures with a light hand somehow, rarely showing his hand as the supreme architect behind the curtain.
It’s clear from the very beginning of the DCC series that it’s written from the same anti-authoritarian DNA as Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ursula K. Le Guin, but the action promised by its premise makes this kind of theme much harder to develop. How, in other words, can Carl engage in the corruption of the whole system if he’s stuck inside the various levels of the dungeon? Carl and Donut could, of course, manage to break out of the confines of the show and go after the villains directly, but that would rob the readers of however many levels of the dungeons were bypassed in their escape, and I don’t want to read a bunch of DCC books that don’t take place in the dungeons. This is what happened in Mockingjay, the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy, where Katniss and crew were no longer inside the actual contest but instead navigating through the twelve districts of Panem to reach the Capitol and overthrow it. While an understandable (and even inevitable) direction to go for a plot involving a society that forces children to kill each other as some punishment for past revolts, it simultaneously misunderstands what makes The Hunger Games appealing. Without the structure of the games, Mockingjay is a complete mess, with Suzanne Collins stuffing this third entry with ungainly amounts of exposition dumping, reductive political explanations, and moral rabblerousing. Not only was there not enough explication in the first two books to set up all this policial upheaval, there also wasn’t enough of the fucking games. We only got to experience two of them, which for a premise so fascinating (though not wholly original; see the 1999 novel Battle Royale by Kōshun Takami and the 2000 film adaptation by Kinji Fukasaku) is a real waste.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is faced with a similar conflict between its premise and its premise’s logical narrative outcomes; it simply must become a story about Carl and Co. not simply surviving the dungeons, but overthrowing the system that created them. Yet, to do so quickly turns the fun concept of video-game mechanics and level design brought to life into a dour and typical tale of dystopian revolt. One of the ways Dinniman maintains the balance is by regularly having his protagonist articulate not only the calls of injustice and oppression, but also a mantra for surviving them. At various points of extreme duress or in response to numerous instances of cruelty by the powers that be, Carl utters to himself the same lines over and over: “You will not break me. Fuck you all. You will not break me.” Carl’s mere survival becomes an act of resistance, so he can contribute to the unrest while still locked away from it all.
In the first three novels in the series, Dinniman has managed to stay firmly (under)grounded in his dungeon conceit, and by all appearances the rest of the entries will be the same. I hope readers get all eighteen levels of the dungeon and a full-on intergalactic uprising.
The primary reasons for wanting both from this series didn’t become clear to me until the third novel, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which takes place on the fourth level. Levels one through three ratcheted up the danger, the scope, and the aesthetic of the dungeon, but level four is something completely different. It’s a dizzyingly complex series of intersecting subway systems—an entire world of train stations, tunnels, and tracks. The overall layout of the byzantine braid of trains is kept hidden from the crawlers, and with dozens of lines and hundreds of stations, it’s a navigational nightmare.
It’s also fun as fuck. I was so tickled by the leap in terrain that The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook represents for the series, it made me much more excited to see what other kinds of constructs Dinniman can imagine—and completely deliver on—for future levels. I never could have predicted a dungeon design like this, but what’s just as impressive is how much Dinniman wrests out of this set up. He doesn’t just create this fertile environment; he exploits it for every ounce of narrative juice.
The other aspect of this third novel—the part that makes me want to see how the politics of the series play out post-dungeon—comes in the form of the item that gives the book its title. There’s a thing in Dungeon Crawler Worldcalled the Prize Carousel. Fans of crawlers (whose numbers are in the trillions) can vote on items given to them, which often result in troll gifts, but sometimes they vote to allow the crawlers to pick their own prizes during a segment that’s accompanied by “cheesy 1970s-style game show music.” Carl’s chosen by fans to receive one, and in a hypertense, ticking-clock scenario in which the values of the options are not explained, Carl picks a book as his prize. By all appearances, the book—titled, as I’m sure you can guess, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook—is filled with “chicken and goblin recipes,” and Carl assumes he fucked up. But then on the first page, he finds a message (italics in original):
Hello, Crawler. As you’re about to find, this is a very special book. If you’re reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only.
Together, we will burn it all to the ground.
Carl’s prize turns out to be a treasure trove of invaluable dungeon information compiled by a series of past crawlers. This is the 24th edition. It’s filled, its opening exclaims, with “Potions, Explosives, Traps, Secret Societies, Dungeon Shortcuts, and more. Much more.” Carl can’t tell anyone about the true nature of the Cookbook, so he must pretend to discover what it shows him as he goes along. By owning this book (and soon, contributing to it), Carl has been initiated into a long-running tradition of resistance.
What’s so cool about this plot point goes beyond the promising information Carl discovers and employs to great benefit (though that is a rad aspect); the Cookbook represents the legacy of art, literature, and advocacy of real-world activism. What is art if not handed-down wisdom from folks who have survived, fought, and overthrew the authoritarians of the past? And what are artists if not contributors to a collective understanding of what life can be, what it actually is, and how to survive that reality? The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook is a tradition in response to the oppressive system the crawlers are stuck in. As no crawler has ever beaten all eighteen levels, the Cookbook typifies the power of collective resistance, particularly in the recognition of each crawler who adds to the Cookbook that their own survival isn’t as important as the eventual survival of someone, anyone, who might then be able to burn it all to the ground.
This kind of incremental heroism recalls the final lines from Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a philosopher, borrowing from Freud, states:
Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.
We live under the power of megacorporations and the corrupt politicians who abet them. We’re dominated by entities with trillions of dollars’ worth of influence and control, and a populace who are too often convinced or coerced into supporting these entities without gaining access to any of their fortunes. We’re stuck in dungeons concocted by resource-stealing, planet-killing businesses who don’t even bother to stage the productions that undergird their growth; now, we’re the ones who generate the content—Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, TikToks, Facebook posts. We’re making them billions of dollars in the hopes that maybe we’ll be able to make a tiny percentage of that for our compensation.
Now, the Hunger Games conundrum doesn’t apply to the Dungeon Crawler Carl series because, unlike the world Panem, Dinniman’s universe of the Syndicate and the Skull Empire doesn’t differentiate between the world inside the crawl and the outside political body that created it. Katniss was at least aware of the existence of the Hunger Games before she was forced to participate in it. The world beyond the Games is Katniss’s normal life. For Carl (and every other contestant of all crawls) had no idea that a) his planet and species were created expressly for this purpose, and b) he would be thrust into not only the confines of the dungeon, but also the fact of an intergalactic community. Carl has no idea what this reality looks like, and neither did the previous authors of the Cookbook. Dinniman’s premise, in other words, demands that Carl and Co. stay inside the dungeon and fight the powers that be from the inside, effectively marrying together premise and theme so that the fun of the levels can be the narrative focus while the real story emerges just underneath the bombast. Knowing this compels me to commit to reading every goddamn entry in this series.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is supremely contemporary. Its video-game sensibility, its irreverent humor, and its anti-corporate clarion call against the rampant thievery of our planet’s resources and the usurpation of our attention—these elements truly make Dinniman’s over-the-top, reference-heavy, rabblerousing insanity a tale for our time.
In Carl we trust.
