Dungeon Crawler Carl & You
Okay, so I've been going off about Dungeon Crawler Carl for months now and I do not see it stopping at any point, so let's see if I can entice one or two of you to join in my madness.
DCC is Lit RPG and written like a video game come to life, from the point of view of the contestants trapped within the game. There are levels to conquer and loot boxes and quests and an AI running things that has a very tenuous hold on stability to begin with and doesn't keep it for very long.
Carl is just... a guy. He's just a guy with a traumatic backstory that he's squished deep down inside himself because he doesn't like drama and he thinks he's doing just fine because it's done, you know? It's in the past, can't change it, can't hurt him anymore.
(It can hurt him. It does hurt him.)
The world as we know it is destroyed in a split second, Carl surviving by mere happenstance and the only reason he goes into the dungeon is that he will literally freeze to death otherwise. At no point is this guy searching for glory or thinking he's a savior, he's just trying to survive another day. That Carl happens to have his ex-girlfriend's prize-winning tortie Persian cat with him is a coincidence - and it turns out to be his major lifeline in the entire series. Princess Donut is his partner in crime, his bestie for life and if he ever loses her, he will lose everything. Goodbye to the last vestiges of his sanity.
The first couple levels are pretty contained, Carl & Donut learning the ropes and how to survive every encounter with increasingly powerful enemies who want nothing more than to see them dead, the eyes of the universe and the corporations running the shitshow ever focusing on them and trying to eke out as much profit as possible at the same time.
Then they meet other survivors - both good and misled - and the beauty of humanity comes out, the sacrifices they are willing to make for one another, the knowledge that they aren't likely to survive, but they make the right choices anyway because dying might be bad, but letting each other down is worse.
The secondary characters grow in complexity with every level. Where it was once just Carl & Donut, it becomes dozens of characters, from all over the world, all of them gifted in their own way, all of them fighting as best they can, some of them betrayed, some of them dying, some of them choosing to go out on their own terms. Men and women and animal alike, they are individual and committed to the greater good.
Matt Dinniman has written a series that takes an emotional toll on its readers: pain, loss, horror, humor, desperation, walking through life with an unrelenting grief. There are dick jokes and drug-dealing, lava-spitting llamas and riffs on Wonderwall and lines like: Trauma does that, I thought. It's an explosion with your heart at the center. It changes everything all at once.
Also, there are velociraptors.
And a decapitated, talking sex doll head that wants to kill everyone's mothers.
It's a LOT of stuff going on, all right?
And just as you think the story can't get any better, enter Jeff Hays. Our audiobook narrator, our man of a hundred distinct voices. Good god, he's phenomenal. I've listened to so many books and while there are some very talented narrators out there, Jeff Hays leaves them in the motherfucking dust. I honest to god thought he was using an app to manipulate his voice for different characters until I saw him narrating in real time and I was utterly blown away by his talent.
The combination of this story by Matt Dinniman and narration by Jeff Hays has me going back, time and time again. I recommend the experience wholeheartedly and hope you'll give it a chance.
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