Anyone who has watched a friend fight cancer inside the American healthcare system knows what it is to play a game whose rules were written by someone else, for someone else’s profit.
About a month ago, a good friend who is fighting cancer told me he was reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. We had reached the point in his fight where we were running out of things to talk about as he started chemo. Most of his other hobbies were not ones we shared. Despite our friendship, you can only talk about something you know nothing about for so long without sounding like an idiot.
When he told me he was on Book 4, I vaguely remembered it. A few years ago another friend had recommended it. To say I didn’t finish it is an understatement. I couldn’t stand it. It had long descriptions of the AI talking crazily as it described items or events. The main character had the emotional depth of yet-to-be-chiseled stone. There was an annoying cat, and then I got to the part with the goblin babies. IYKYK.
I didn’t bounce off of it; I threw it across the room. I am not a prude by any stretch, but I am not for language and violence for their own sake.
When he told me he really liked it and how funny and deep it could be, I wasn’t surprised, but I was intrigued. I assumed again that I would bounce off it. But for his sake and the sake of our conversations, I decided to give it another try.
I am really glad I did. My life as of late hasn’t been the brightest either, though nowhere close to my friend’s or his family’s. Facing a radically different, or at least possibly shorter, life than you expected is not something most people want to think about. Much less with a semblance of honor, courage, or grace.
Besides the fact that the books are more addictive than the Krakaren’s meth, the video-game elements enhance and purify rather than dilute the books’ themes.
The books see themselves as standing against late-stage capitalism. More than that, they are a humorous, irreverent, and poignant parable about the human desire to live free in systems that feel like games stacked against them. I see why my friend liked it.
Carl and Princess Donut, along with the other crawlers, are in a system called the Dungeon Crawler World. The apocalypse of the earth, for reasons that should remain spoilers, is seen as necessary by the broader galactic leadership, and the crawl has become a fully televised reality bloodbath for the obvious economic gain of the show runners. Many who struggle to make ends meet can see themselves and their struggles in the crawlers. I don’t agree with the books’ critique, but I am sympathetic to it. Anyone who has watched a friend fight cancer inside the American healthcare system knows what it is to play a game whose rules were written by someone else, for someone else’s profit. Still, I think the books are careless here. The setting makes anarchy and terroristic threats look like proportional responses, and in real life they rarely are. That said, every floor, every contrivance, every bad break, and every ridiculous setup builds the theme of overcoming impossible odds.
Yes, Carl is unchiseled, but he earned his armor. His backstory is one of the best bits of the whole story, and it explains why he was so protected and uninterested before the dungeon opened. As the books continue, you watch his good and protective side get chiseled out of that block of granite. Yes, Princess Donut is annoying, but does she ever deserve to stay. Over and over, through human ingenuity, divine providence or luck, and friendship, the heroes barely squeak by, but not without devastating, heartrending loss. Yes, the violence is over the top. But the humor is not decoration. It is the necessary counterweight to the tragedy and the violence; without it the books would be unreadable, and with it they are hard to put down. The sense of humor will be familiar to anyone who watched the early years of South Park (I mean that both as high praise and as a warning to people easily offended).
I am only on Book 6, soon to be Book 7, and I expect to write more about the series and its themes. If you are partial to video games and don’t mind ridiculous, violent, expletive-filled novels, I can recommend them so far. I am starting graduate classes, but I hope to do a full review by the end of the year.