Dungeon Crawler Carl (Book 1)

Why I switched from print to audio

I was already a few chapters into the paperback when a buddy told me I was doing it wrong and should listen to it instead. He was right, and I have not regretted it once.

Jeff Hays narrates this, and calling him a narrator undersells it. The book has an enormous cast — Carl, a cat with opinions, an AI game show host, alien viewers, dozens of monsters — and he gives all of them a distinct voice without it ever tipping into pantomime. There are stretches that work better performed than they do on the page, because the humor is in the delivery.

I am starting book three now. I decided I was reading the whole series somewhere around chapter four of book one.

What it actually is

Earth gets demolished to make way for an intergalactic dungeon-crawl game show. Carl goes outside in his boxers chasing his ex-girlfriend's cat and is therefore still alive when the buildings come down. The two of them end up contestants.

That premise sounds like a joke, and the first stretch leans into it. Then it turns out to be a book about violence as entertainment, and about what people do when survival is a ratings number. It gets a lot heavier than the cover suggests.

Who should skip it

If profanity bothers you, skip it. If you need a protagonist who is in control of events, skip it. And if you have never touched LitRPG, know going in that the genre includes stat readouts and system notifications as part of the text. On audio those land better than you would expect, which is another argument for the format.

Audiobook or print

Audio, and it is not close for this one. I own both and the paperback is now the thing on the shelf that proves I was there early. If someone in your house is going to read it in print, buy both — it is one of the few series where the two formats are genuinely different experiences rather than the same book delivered two ways.