I didn’t expect to love this book. I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl during a weekend wind-down thinking it’d be another throwaway LitRPG romp. What I got instead was a savage, smart, and strangely heartwarming odyssey that punched far above its weight class.

The premise is gloriously absurd — Earth gets repurposed into a sadistic intergalactic reality show dungeon crawl, and our hero Carl (along with his hilariously imperious cat Princess Donut) is one of the unlucky contestants. But here’s the kicker: beneath the gore, the chaos, and the chainsaw-wielding goblin clowns (yes, that happens), there’s a ruthless efficiency to the worldbuilding. It’s startup-like in its cleverness — the gamification systems are airtight, the incentives crystal clear, and the progression loop is addictive as hell.

Carl is the kind of reluctant founder I can relate to: thrust into leadership, constantly adapting, learning from failure, and building alliances in real-time. He doesn’t start off as a hero. He becomes one by iterating quickly and refusing to quit. The narrative is lean, brutally funny, and filled with moments that made me care. I found myself thinking, this is what it would look like if Elon Musk, Hunter S. Thompson, and Terry Pratchett co-wrote a dungeon crawler after an ayahuasca retreat.

Is it literature? No. Is it addictive, insanely clever, and one of the most entertaining things I’ve read this year? Absolutely!