I’m not surprised most people rate this book either one star or five stars. There’s so much to love about this book but there is also so much to dislike.

Humour: Dinniman throws jokes at you at an alarming pace. Have you ever watched a sitcom where they try for a joke every three or four lines? It feels very similar to that. Whilst some of these jokes landed with me, I don’t think I entirely gel with the humour and the sheer amount of it really does ruin my experience sometimes, for example if Carl gets a series of new achievements, each one will have an accompanying description with some jokes added into it. I personally found it too much at times but I can understand how somebody would love the book if their sense of humour lines up.

Characters: The book is centred around Carl and Donut, his cat. There is little to no depth to any of them. There is some attempt to give Carl a tragic backstory but it is half-hearted and lazy. The rest of the characters are very one-dimensional, from the other humans, to the monsters, to the ‘aliens’. The characters are tropes but given the genre I think that makes sense. I was not expecting huge surprises in terms of what the characters were, but I am disappointed that there was not a single character I could say that I was excited to read about.

Story: There is nothing really new in this story and there’s little that will surprise someone who has read fantasy books before. Aliens come to invade the world and basically create a DnD style series of dungeons for all humans to partake in. It is popcorn fantasy, like the Transformers of the book world. Is that bad? No. There is a place for this book and it is enjoyable to read but do not expect anything more than mediocracy.

Several times during the book there is an attempt to elicit emotion from the reader by displaying just how horrific and terrifying the situation is but it does not work given the overall tone of the book, which is as happy-go-lucky and unserious as you can get. To be able to move from humour to serious topics and then back again is an extremely hard feat and this book falls short of achieving that.

Rambling:
I found myself rolling my eyes at how lazy and tropey a lot of the writing was in the book, but then I asked myself why I expected any more. This is essentially based on dungeons and dragons. The stories that the main characters were given are tired and played out. Is it the fault of the author that they have chosen to use these stories? Yes and no. Yes because I feel like they could have tried to make the stories more interesting or at least less generic. There were times during the first quarter of this book where I contemplated putting it down, and in fact I even did for a month, because the quality of the prose and the story was so poor. But then I picked it up again and found myself flying through the pages. But I also think the answer is no, you cannot entirely blame the author for using tropes and lazy stories because those quests and grinding up levels are staples of the genre. They maybe could have been done in a more interesting way but I do not begrudge Dinniman for taking the easy way out. Also part of me thinks (or hopes) that the reason for this book being as slow and not having proper payoffs is because he is setting up for the second book. Will I read the next one to find out? I don’t know.

But is this a bad book? Absolutely not. I enjoyed reading it but you must accept it for what it is. It will have lazy writing, it will have tropey characters, it will throw ten jokes at you and only one of them will be funny. But it is also fun. I like watching big Transformers fight each other, and I liked reading how a man and his cat tackle a big dungeon of monsters, and I’ll probably read more.