Will I love Dungeon Crawler Carl?

This one leans heavier on the laughter, lighter on the thinking—but sometimes a little bit of fun is exactly what I need.

It’s a chaotic mash-up of The Hunger Games and Ready Player One, except with far more laughs and a talking cat. It’s the first in a long series (which I admittedly haven’t finished yet), but even on its own it’s a blast: action-packed, darkly funny, and weirdly endearing.

I fell in love with the two main characters and happily followed them into the madness.

I kept seeing recommendations for this book on Shepherd, but I was reluctant to try it. Many years ago, I tried a progressive fantasy book, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. This was a colossal mistake on my part because Dungeon Crawler Carl is a work of genius. 

This book is one of the funniest, most beautiful books I have ever read. The satire is biting, and I love the characters from the bottom of my heart. If you love the TV show “Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” you will love the dark, absurd humor of this book.… show more.

Amazing series of books. Fun, exciting, poignant at times and with great plotting. Listen to the audiobooks if you can, you won't be disappointed!

LitRPG was never a genre I read until I kept getting hammered over the head with this book in all my online book groups. As soon as I read the first page, I was completely hooked! So funny, so fresh, so original, Carl is a main character we can't help but root for. Even though the odds are stacked against him, Carl keeps plugging along and surviving.

At times, this book is heartbreaking, but there's one consistent thread through the entire series: hope. You can't help but fall in love with all these characters and root for them to stick… show more.

I love apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books. I like seeing how people act when the rules are changed, and everything is on the line, and Dinniman has some really creative ideas on how to change the rules!

The result is a bit grimmer than in my own series, with plenty of horror and trauma, but with enough levity and wholesome moments between the main cast to keep it from feeling bleak. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is a surprisingly deep character and a personal favorite.

This series is the most FUN I have had reading in a long, long time. It's bonkers, off-the-wall, and hilarious at times, but there really is solid substance, emotion, character development, and heart to it, too. I'm so mad I binge-read the first six books in under a month because now I have to wait for the next book and I'm so impatient!

As someone who enjoys roleplaying games and laughter, this book was exactly what I needed. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, humanity is forced into a giant, life and death, for real RPG. It's horrible but absurdly funny at once. I recommend that you listen to this as an audio book for a next level experience. I read a lot of books for kids, but this, despite the humor, is for an adult audience.

The world ends to become a reality show for aliens and some guy named Carl gets stuck in the middle of it all with boxer shorts, pink crocs, and his ex’s cat, Princess Donut. What’s not to love? I laughed through half of it (unusual for me), and waited on the edge of my seat for the rest of it.

For me…well, there’s a cat. I do love cats. And she’s sassy, salty, and snobbish. Carl is clueless, clumsy, and cantankerous. It’s a beautiful combination. Jeff does an incredible job of becoming each character, yet keeping every single one unique.… show more.

Progression fantasy is a young genre, and currently divides into a handful of different categories, the largest of which are LitRPGs and Cultivation fiction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is almost universally praised as the best of the former.

I love it because it takes an impossible situation—Earth being transformed into a dungeon-delving murder reality show for the rest of the universe—and somehow injects equal mixes of humor and pathos.

I love that the main characters, the titular Carl and his cat, Donut, are the perfect emotional counterparts to the subgenre’s traditionally crunchy numbers… levels, skills, spells, and increasingly overpowered items all… show more.

When I was first introduced to the world of GameLit and Progression I was struggling to get into it. Most of it felt dry, samey, and worst of all they liked to throw up walls of stats at every possible opportunity. Preferably at the worst possible time to do so.

Dungeon Crawler Carl did none of that. 

The setting wasn’t your cookie-cutter fantasy world. It was a dark world where contestants are thrown into a messed-up game to fight for their lives. One filled with comedy so good it was easy to miss just how bad things really were for… show more.