Not something I'd normally pick, but enjoyable.
I've never played dungeons and dragons, and in my head, I kept thinking of Minecraft as my rough frame of reference (which I've touched because of the kids but not really played to any real amount).
The book follows Carl, who, as we guess from the title and thankfully within a few pages find that he's forced to become a dungeon crawler for the entertainment for some extra terrestrial intergalactic world galloping corporate ring thingy.
He descends into the dungeon with his cat, which, thankfully and unsurprisingly gains the ability to talk.
None of the characters or the story is particularly unique. I was describing the book to my daughter whom immediately asked if it was based on a video game. It's not, as far as I know, but I guess this is the point, there's lots of cultural shorthand that the story can pull from.
Even though I say there's nothing surprising in there, it didn't hold the book back from being fun and funny at times.
It does try to bring up the indiscriminate mass murder of so-called monsters (ie. not human), and maybe that's picked up in future books (of which I understand there's seven more), but it did rather feel like the character rather quickly took to it like a duck to water. But then, does it matter? This book wasn't trying to be a social commentary on how quickly humans can disassociate.
I think I'd like to pick up some of the next books in the series, but I'm really not a fan of "required" reading to get the complete story, so I suspect if I do ever get to finish book eight, it'll likely be years from now…
2 Highlights
The goblin had more than half of its life drained.
I’d clocked it pretty good, but not that good. It was like I’d just punched a ten-year-old.
We’ve fixed the hallway bathroom bug. So, if you open the door, and someone else enters, they will no longer explode. Sorry about that.