Dungeon Crawler Carl

I actually started this several months ago and 50 pages in I abandoned because I decided this is just silly escapist trash. But I needed something new to listen to in the car and Cybil of all people (“not in to guy books”) praised the audio edition and that was good enough for me to give it a second chance.

Now, having finished book one, I can say definitively that, yes, it is still mostly silly and escapist but there are multiple subplots to make it interesting as well as recurring gags. For example Carl comes in to to the dungeon with no shoes and no pants and never seems to find any, certainly not in loot from monsters…then it becomes evident that the AI(?) running the dungeon seems to have a foot fetish focused on Carl.

I should add that the voice acting is excellent and I can not now imagine reading it when I could listen to it. Judging from the 4.7 stars on 23.8K listens I am not at all unique in my taste for this amazing piece of “LitRPG”

This is a story about a characters trapped in a dystopian universe that I listen to relieve the stress of living in Donald Trump’s America. Now I have six more books to consume, and since clever old Amazon/Audible has camped out on exclusive access to the audiobooks, there will go six more credits into Jeff Bezo’s grandchildren’s children’s children’s inheritance.

[The premise is that the Borant Corporation in return for development assistance, and because nobody objected, taken over the planet for salvage and reclamation of natural resources. In a cataclysmic even kill all but several million people and the survivors are directed to dungeon entrances that are distributed across the planet. Those who survive the entrance to the dungeon and make to a training guild room are now dungeon crawlers and will discover that they are now part of an intergalactic reality survival show that will end when only one person (party) is left alive. (or they make it past level nine - actually I am not clear.
Our hero is Carl with his (soon to be sidekick) Princess Donut his ex-girlfriend’s persian show cat. They were, by a stroke of luck, in the right place when 99.9999% of humanity died and the dungeon opened.
The audio has great voice acting, Mr. Hays voices Carl as more or less Patrick Warburton, whatever he comes across as sympathetic. Anyway the premise is one part Hitchhiker’s Guide, one part Hunger Games and one part Doom. The humor is pop culture references, the monsters are taken from mixed with character driven (Princess Donut while sentient and clever still doe not quite understand the overall context of her existence (her owner is dead and she is the last of her species) but she is a show cat who knows that if she does well she’ll be on TV and get prizes)]: #