Two Recent DNFs: DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL & THE LAST ONE

I’m not sure I’ve ever written a DNF post before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. Both of these books were highly anticipated, so DNFing them is a hard pill to swallow. I also want to mention that both books are getting rave reviews from lots of readers, so they might work for you too.  Here are my thoughts and why I decided not to finish them.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Just about every blogger I know gave this book five stars, so it’s painful to admit Dungeon Crawler Carl just wasn’t the right book for me. This is LitRPG, and for someone who doesn’t play video games, I just didn’t see the appeal. At first things were great. The set-up is a lot of fun, a bit audacious and over-the-top, but I was curious to see where the author was going to take things. Everyone on Earth who happens to be inside a structure is killed in an instant by aliens, but Carl was outside at 2:00 a.m. in the freezing cold, wearing nothing but jockey shorts and his ex-girlfriend’s too-small-Crocs, chasing his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut after she jumped out the window. Lucky Carl, he didn’t die, but now he has to participate in a fight-to-the-death, televised game. I loved Princess Donut the cat (who ends up being able to talk soon after they enter the dungeon), a snarky and entitled fluffball who has funnier dialog than Carl, to be honest. Carl, though, didn’t make much of an impact on me, which might be one reason I struggled to finish the book.

And while I did enjoy some of the LitRPG elements, like the achievement levels and rewards that keep popping up as Carl and Donut make their way through the tunnels, it got old very fast. The game is comprised of eighteen levels, starting one level down and getting deeper as you go, and all I could think was that by page 143 (where I stopped reading), they were still on Level 1. There are seven books in the series, I believe, and I don’t know whether those eighteen levels are spread out over all seven books, but hell if I’m going to stick around to find out, lol. The story is already repetitive with Carl and Donut running through tunnels, meeting something dangerous (trolls, rats, weird alien creatures, etc) and killing it, being rewarded with various magical spells and weapons (which they digitally add to their digital inventory) and then doing it all over again. In between there are flashes of more interesting fare, like a couple of other characters that keep popping up, but I was just too bored to keep going.

Too bad, because the worldbuilding was so cool, and I wanted to learn more about the big picture. No doubt I’m missing out on a lot of fun stuff, but my time is just too precious right now to slog through a story that might get more interesting later on.

Sorry, Carl, that’s it for me.

The Last One by Rachel Howzell Hall

I only made it to page 50 in The Last One, although I wanted to give it more of a chance to get better. Last year I read and really enjoyed Rachel Howzell Hall’s What Never Happened, a contemporary mystery that takes place on Catalina Island. Hall’s writing style worked really well for that genre, and I have to admit I was a little nervous going into The Last One, which is fantasy. I was worried about the author’s bold, breezy writing style translating to a fantasy setting and characters, and I was right to worry—it didn’t work at all. This basically reads like a fantasy book written by an author who’s never written fantasy before (and maybe hasn’t even read a lot of it). Not only is the plot confusing, but the characters’ contemporary way of speaking, their use of slang and swear words, etc. just didn’t lend itself to a fantasy vibe.

Basically the story is about a woman named Kai who wakes up in a strange land without any memories, and she meets some people who try to help her. It’s clear she’s going to be someone important, maybe a chosen one (ugh), and of course right off the bat she meets a tall, handsome and very annoying man who will become her spicy love interest. I don’t have much more to say about The Last One, simply because I just couldn’t read one more page. The story never grabbed me and those first fifty pages were bor-ing. I’m sad because the cover is so pretty, and of course it’s possible I’m missing out on a lot of good elements by quitting early.

Let me know if you’ve read either book, I’d love to hear your thoughts!