The Next Chapter Book Club

Synopsis:

It’s the most-watched game show in the galaxy!

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth–from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds to all the trucks and cars–collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.

The buildings and all the people inside, they’ve all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.

Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over. In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your views and your followers. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.

You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big.

You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that “it” factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That’s the only way to truly survive in this game, with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game.

Average Score: 2.34

Review: Sometimes a book scores an average score because we all enjoyed it but it was nothing special, sometimes books have an average score because the group is divided! I prefer the latter because its usually a more fun discussion and that’s what we have with Dungeon Crawler Carl!

We all agreed that the book was very readable and funny in places and that’s really where the agreement ended.

6/11 reviewers found it tedious, are not fans of LitRPG and found the scene setting game sections too frequent and too long.

5/11 thought it was engaging, fun, humorous and are likely to (or already have) read more in the series.

I think its always difficult reading the first book in a series at book club because there’s a lot of world building when you’re not sure if you want to read any more. This book’s premise exacerbated that because you know going in there’s no way it ends in a satisfying place.

This book had one of the widest ranges of scores – from 0.5 to 4.5!!