The dog needed a walk and I had a new audiobook queued up. Of course, it’s the one BookTok wouldn’t shut up about. If you loved Project Hail Mary, they kept saying, you have to listen to Dungeon Crawler Carl. Same energy. Same narrator magic.
So I hit play, and Jeff Hays started talking.
Twenty minutes in, the world had ended. Aliens had liquefied most of humanity. A guy named Carl, standing outside in boxer briefs on the coldest night of his life, was trying to coax his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning show cat down from a tree. The cat’s name is Princess Donut. The cat is about to become a co-protagonist with stat blocks and a British accent.
I was hooked.
The book moves. It does not waste time. The premise is set up in the first thirty minutes, and then the dungeon opens up, and Carl and Donut start crawling. There are goblins. There are llamas. There is a meth war between the goblins and the llamas. There are lots of fights and explosions. There is an AI announcer who reads system messages with the cadence and vocal stylings of Patrick Warburton in full The Tick mode or maybe an over-the-top Joe Swanson from Family Guy.
Jeff Hays is the reason all this works.
He gives every monster its own voice. He plays Donut as if she’s Maggie Smith in full Downton Abbey mode in a cat’s body. He reads loot box descriptions with the smug contempt of a casino dealer who knows the house always wins. Without him, those passages are footnotes. With him, they’re punchlines.
I know this because I also own the physical book.
Reading it on the page is a completely different experience. The stat blocks sit there on the page. The system’s crackling audio announcements become extended bullet points in print. The jokes lose their timing. The audio’s pace comes from a performance. The pace of the page comes from you, and you don’t have Jeff Hays’ voice in your head doing the work for free.
So here’s the first honest thing to say about Dungeon Crawler Carl. The BookTok pitch was not quite right. Project Hail Mary is a tight, controlled story about one man and one impossible problem. Ray Porter’s narration is gorgeous, but the book holds up if you read it in silence. Dungeon Crawler Carl needs Jeff Hays. It’s a comedy that depends on a performance.
Look, both books are amazing as audiobooks. I recommend both, but unless you are deep into LitRPG, video games, and silly characters, Dungeon Crawler Carl only works as an audiobook.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that vibe, but after a while, the jokes run thin.
About halfway through, the bit started to wear on me. The same comedic rhythms are repeated. The system messages stopped surprising or being particularly funny. The line “New Achievement!” became especially tiresome. Donut’s diva routine got less funny each time the book reached for it.
I started noticing what wasn’t there.
The female characters never quite become people. A few get descriptions before they get personalities. Some get personalities and exit the story. The male protagonist’s interior life takes up most of the book, which is fine. The absence of any woman who feels equally real is not. I don’t read it as malicious. I read it as lazy. Dinniman was running hard on a premise and didn’t slow down to draw anyone he wasn’t going to need for the plot.
The book isn’t punching down on purpose. It’s just not trying to be anything other than a really silly story.
Many fans defend the book as satire. Of capitalism. Of reality TV. Of the attention economy. I don’t buy any of it. Real satire is what McSweeney’s publishes regularly. Real satire is Saturday Night Live riffing on politics and pop culture. Every issue of The Onion is satire. Those writers pressurize a single premise until it tells you something true about the world. Dungeon Crawler Carl is doing something else. It found an interesting subgenre, hired the best audiobook narrator, and let the chaos do the work.
That’s not a failure. I just don’t see it trying to be anything more than that.
I get why people love it. The series has a rabid following for real reasons. Hays gives a once-in-a-decade performance. The premise is fresh enough to feel new even when the jokes aren’t. The aliens-as-game-show conceit lets the book go anywhere it wants. A TV adaptation is coming. More books are coming. Hays will keep narrating them, and people will keep loving them.
I won’t be one of those people. I’m not opening book two anytime soon. Maybe never.
That’s not a complaint. It’s a fact about who this book is for and I’m not really the target audience. I had a good time with the book and that was enough. I have zero desire to learn more.
Your mileage may vary.
Be seeing you.
