There is a moment, early in The Apocalypse Is a Game. And Carl Is Just Getting Started., when the reader senses that something larger than story is at stake.

Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl delivers explosive action, dark humor, and a cat the world will never forget.

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

The Weight of the Quotidian

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

“The book does not ask to be admired. It asks to be lived with.”

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

A Letter, Long Withheld

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

What lingers, after the last page, is not a verdict but a temperature. The Apocalypse Is a Game. And Carl Is Just Getting Started. leaves the room a few degrees warmer, a few degrees more honest.