Book of the Month July 2026 - Dungeon Crawler Carl

This month we're going with a quickly growing favourite among staff Dungeon Crawler Carl! Just announced as an upcoming TV series at least four of our staff have recently started reading and trying out the series. I personally haven't gotten around to it yet so this month I'm passing the review over to Matt.

The apocalypse will be televised!

I was looking for a new book series to read this Spring, and I overheard some coworkers discussing Dungeon Crawler Carl. It sounded interesting enough, so I decided to give it a try. It quickly became one of my favorite book series and I blazed through all the books quickly.
If I were to describe Dungeon Crawler Carl in a sentence it would be “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets the Truman Show.” A similarity I think will be clear from the very first chapter when every man-made structure on Earth is destroyed in an instant by aliens, leaving alive only the people who were outside at that exact moment. All done so Earth could be harvested for it’s elements by an intergalactic corporation, but the paperwork was filed properly, and the humans were notified back when the Pyramids were being built, so it is really our fault for not filing an objection with the intergalactic Syndicate government that rules the universe. As far as they are concerned, this alien corporation owns Earth. The only way to get it back is to win the gameshow, Dungeon Crawler World.
It is this disaster where we meet our protagonist, Carl. Carl had left a window open, and his girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, got out and up a tree. So at that exact moment, he was outside in just a jacket, his boxers, and a pink pair of crocs when his apartment building was completely flattened, stranding him in the middle of winter in Seattle. Faced with frostbite, Carl took his first chance at shelter when a door to the Dungeon opened and he took Donut down into the Dungeon.
Over 14 million humans did exactly as Carl did and entered one of thousands of doors that opened around the world to become Crawlers. They all found themselves in a Dungeon filled with monsters that operates like a video game RPG with spells and stats. The rules are very straightforward: find a stairway to get down to the next floor of the Dungeon. The first Crawler to make it down to the 18th Floor gets ownership of the planet Earth. There is only one problem, Dungeon Crawler World has been running for thousands of years as thousands of planets are harvested for their resources and nobody has ever won the game.
What follows is an action-packed adventure as Carl, Donut, and allies they gain along the way attempt to navigate the Dungeon and escape with their lives. My favorite part is how Carl often must come up with plans on the spot to get out of increasingly dangerous situations. He is a somewhat simple man, but when push comes to shove, he shows off a hidden cunning with some risky yet brilliant plans. Carl has to make some very tough decisions as he ventures deeper into the Dungeon, and we really get to see what he is made of. But despite having to do awful things like killing the Non-Player Characters who populate the Dungeon, it also shows the deep compassion Carl has for others with him risking his life for very long odds to save others.
This series can get fairly dark. It starts with most of humanity being killed by an uncaring corporation and then continues with a death game with a very high death toll. There is often quite a bit of gore and violence. But the author manages to balance this out with humor that can deflate the tension, albeit the humor can sometimes be just as dark. This makes some grim situations feel far more lighter despite the stakes at play. But this kind of humor isn’t for everyone. I find the first 50 pages is a good litmus test of if the tone of the book is right for you. It has probably the worst of it in that time for how brutal the series can be, so if you are fine after that you will enjoy the rest of the series.
There are 8 books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series:

1.    Dungeon Crawler Carl
2.    Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
3.    The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
4.    The Gate of the Feral Gods
5.    The Butcher’s Masquerade
6.    The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
7.    This Inevitable Ruin
8.    A Parade of Horribles