Rating:😼
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a series by Matt Dinniman. I have the strong sense that I’ll be reading all of these - eight of them are out so far - so I’ll put some thoughts down book-by-book in this post as I go.
Spoiler warning for all books reviewed below!
Book 1: Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020)#
Finished August 2026
Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC) starts off so strong. One day at ~2am Seattle time, Carl is forced outside in a snow storm when his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, jumps out the window in the middle of the night. Carl stomps out to fetch her wearing only underwear and a leather jacket when suddenly all spaces with a roof over them, like buildings, tents, etc., collapse rapidly into the ground, crushing those within them to death.
We learn that a set of intergalactic megacorporations and an institution named the Syndicate have chosen to “reclaim” the minerals from Earth. As part of the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, surviving humans are given a chance to reclaim their minerals. The Borant Corporation has chosen the reclamation option of a World Dungeon: an 18-level underground Dungeon has been constructed under Earth’s surface, and surviving humans may enter it in order to attempt to reach the bottom floor.
The World Dungeon is part of a mega-popular Survivor-like reality TV show. The dungeon is full of enemies, bosses, items, skills, crafting, level-ups, rules and dynamics, like a combination of a role-playing game like D&D and a video game like World of Warcraft. The victories and deaths of “crawlers” are broadcast to the universe. Participant view and follower counts are tracked, introducing a social-media influencer element to the whole thing as well.
Carl enters the dungeon with Princess Donut the cat, who receives an enhanced pet biscuit that gives her above-human level intelligence and the ability to speak, upgrading her from Carl’s pet to fellow dungeon crawler in Carl’s party.
From there, Carl and Donut navigate the first two floors of the dungeon, leveling up their abilities through defeating mobs, killing bosses, and gaining items. Through creative tactics like influencing a goblin horde to make them a makeshift motorbike for transport, defeating a rolling pig-ball boss through wedging it between a table and ceiling and poking it with damage-compounding throwing stars, escaping a powerful Rage Elemental through a clever teleportation scheme, and watching many of their friends and enemies die in gruesome ways, they gain a strong following and get to go on a number of game shows to discuss the game and promote their popularity.
Dinniman does an excellent job balancing the wackiness of their situation with the seriousness of the death and destruction around them. Most of the time, the book is hilarious and engaging, with Carl and Donut working together to get out of another wild situation, but there are moments of trauma and reflection throughout that ground the book in the gravity of the moment. There’s also clearly allusion to a vast set of political and corporate politics that will be sure to permeate the plot throughout the next seven books.
I loved the book! It felt like the reading equivalent of watching someone play a video game on youtube. I love Donut’s mannerisms - she’s such a pompous, curious, particular and overconfident creature, while at the same time being a total fraidy-cat. I’m excited for the following seven to come.
Book 2: Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (2021)#
Finished September 2026
Book 2 begins with Carl and Princess Donut choosing their race and class on the third floor. Donut chooses “Cat” race (unchanged) and “Former Child Actor” class in order to obtain the “Manager” benefit - their game guide, Mordecai, is now their party’s “manager”, teleporting to whatever safe room they enter, messaging with them in their party chat, and giving them advice on monsters and potions and generally navigating the dungeon. This unlocks an important dynamic. Mordecai becomes their go-to for the remainder of the book, an ever-present wealth of knowledge advising them on what to seek and avoid.
Carl chooses the “Primal” race, which allows him to train skills up to level 20 instead of 15, and “Compensated Anarchist” as his class.
They enter the third floor into the Over City: a collection of small villages surrounded by abandoned cityscape. The lore of this world is that a monster breathed poison gas out of a dormant volcano and onto the people living in the Over City long ago, killing or transforming many into monsters.
Carl and Donut engage with the Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus quest, in which they must find out why a spooky circus full of monster clowns, lemurs, bears, and side-show beings lives on, seemingly regenerating every night. Carl gains the Cesta Punta (ball-flinging sport) skill and Donut gains the Scutelliphile (patch collecting) skill. They meet the “elite” character Signet, who is on her own TV show based in the Over City, which Carl & Donut make a guest appearance on. They help Signet and her magic tattoos defeat Grimaldi, who had transformed into a vine that emitted brain-controlling parasites to keep the (now terrifying) circus alive. Carl purposefully infects himself with a parasite in order to get Signet and Grimaldi to reconcile, “beating” the boss and completing the quest.
Carl returns to save Donut and Mongo, their pet velociraptor. Donut had been enchanted to sleep by Signet in order to coerce Carl to help her with Grimaldi. They head to a pub and get another quest from an orc, GumGum, who says that the twisted corpses of prostitutes keep falling from the sky, and asks them to help her find out why. On Mordecai’s advice, they try to shrug the quest off, but it keeps nudging its way into their path.
In the meantime, they buy some higher powered explosives from a crazy Hobgoblin named Pustule and defeat a crazed elf who claims to have trained his whole life to kill them. After finding GumGum’s corpse, they visit the town’s Magistrate Featherfall to ask about the prostitutes. They encounter Miss Quill, his assistant, who collects figurines in boxes and shrugs them off.
From here, the quest goes a bit off the rails - they blow up the Magistrate’s building and eventually learn that Miss Quill was casting a super powerful multi-day spell to kill everyone except the other skyfowl race people. When Carl & Donut killed her, they interrupted the spell, but that kicked off an imminent 45km radius explosion. They encapsulate the explosion’s core in one of Miss Quill’s indestructible figurine boxes and Carl brings it into his inventory just before it completely loses stability. He now has an enormous bomb that’s JUST about to go off as soon as he takes it out of his inventory: the titular Doomsday Scenario.
BUT, it’s not over! One of the rays of light from the bomb hit Miss Quill’s husband before Carl put it away, making HIM the new epicenter of a MAGICAL explosion that they have 20 minutes to escape. This feels pretty contrived, a bit like two little kids having an imagination battle, but it’s still fun as long as belief is a bit suspended.
Before the quest completes, they are guests on the intergalactic TV show Danger Zone with Ripper Wonton with a couple other crawlers and celebrities/talking heads. At the end, a destructive beam wrecks one of the trailers, killing the singer Manasa. It’s revealed that the beam was sent by the Skull Empire, who Carl continues to belittle and embarrass, in an effort to kill Carl and Donut, but they changed trailers at the last minute. This kicks off a set of complicated political machinations between Borant, the company running Earth’s dungeon crawler world show, and the Valtay Corporation.
The book ends with Carl and Donut escaping the magical explosion by heading down to the fourth floor. They are cheated out of their Celestial Quest Boxes by Borant, but gain almost 10 levels worth of experience. It’s revealed that they are in the top ten list of surviving crawlers, with a bounty of 100,000 gold coins on each of their heads for whichever other crawlers kill them.
This was again a super fun read, but I’m a bit worried about the arbitrary and jolting twists and turns some of the quest storylines took. With six published books to go, I hope Dinniman maintains a semblance of plausibility in this wacky world of death, destruction, and leveling up!
Book 3: The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (2021)#
Finished September 2026
Book 3 continues on the Fourth Floor, “The Iron Tangle”, which is a super complex interconnected subway system. My main complaint about this one was going to be how complicated and difficult to visualize and remember the subway was. But then I just reread the author’s note here! Sounds like Dinniman knew :).
Hey, Matt the author guy here. A quick note about this particular book. The fourth floor of the dungeon is set up as a massive, deliberately-confusing puzzle. Carl, Donut, and the rest of the team have to work really hard to figure out the dungeon’s layout. You, the super awesome reader, do not need to understand the floor’s intricacies in order to understand or fully enjoy what is happening. Platform names and numbers and colors are gonna be flying by. It’s okay not to remember them.
Other than the long complicated descriptions of the system, I liked this one, too. Katia’s continued character development is really awesome, and she successfully goes from a character that made me ask “why are you even here” to a solid team member with her own more clearly defined strengths and weaknesses.
They introduce the joint personal space, a sort of Animal Crossing dynamic to the dungeon, which is fun.
Katia learning how to absorb and manipulate metal into her body is awesome. When she kills Hekla with her rush ability…chef’s kiss.
The God battle (glurp glurp!) was really great. Carl’s hubris finally catches up with him, and he’s finally at the whim of an enemy, reliant on his friends to save him. I enjoy Carl’s backstory. He’s unreasonably competent, but you see some of the origins of his avoidant, angry tendencies. It feels like a fairly accurate representation of some male personal stories.
The group chat and crawlers working together, like Elle and Li Na, is fun. Lots of teamwork required for this floor. Miriam and Prepotente seem hilarious, loved their intro tease.
The politics ramp up a bit too, especially with the final show censorship by Borant and the replacement of Zev by Loita.
Book 4: The Gate of the Feral Gods#
Finished October 2026
This was a fun one. The world on the fifth floor is much less physically complex than the train system. Crawlers landed in one of hundreds of enormous bubbles, each sort of like the dome in the Simpsons movie. They find themselves in one of four quadrants within the bubble: land, sea, air, or water. Once their quadrant is liberated by defeating the castle boss, they can move to other quadrants. Once all quadrants are liberated, their bubble pops, and they can move to other popped bubbles or descend the stairs to the sixth level.
Carl, Donut and Katia must liberate the air quadrant’s gnome castle, which ends up being a feral goose named Denise that Carl kills by shoving its head in the garbage disposal. Getting up to the floating castle/house in the sky is pretty tough, though.
Luis is one of the funnier new characters introduced. Florida Man who converted his mom’s transit van to a convertible before the crawl began.
Chris/Maggie’s reappearance is ominous and disconcerting, but ultimately satisfying. The brain worm rushing through Carl’s body to his brain was creepy.
The weeb-like Mad Mage Ghazi who wanted to bring his “waifu” to life through negotiations with gods in the Nothing was entertaining. I loved the successful plot to kill Loita with the exploding robot Donut. The sharktopus sequence is pretty awesome. Keeping Orthrus, the two-headed bubble-sized puppy alive, was an interesting and satisfying sequence - love to see Quan’s arm ripped off.
The politics creeping in are interesting, too. People suing Carl, more Valtay/Borant shenanigans, plus the introduction of the mysterious Dr. Hu in the Open Intellect Pacifist Action Network sponsor. And the Epilogue!! Bea and Ferdinand are alive!
I think I’ve mostly given up on trying to precisely track everything or piece everything together. What this series gives up by relying on long exposition and breadth of universe-building, it gains back in generally awesome scenes of destruction and sticking it to the man.