Sometimes the forces of popular culture ensnare you. Most of the time you can ignore them, but every so often some slippery bastard finds its way past your guard. Then one day, against your better judgment, you too put your baseball cap on backwards. One day, you too join Instagram. One day, you too watch KPop Demon Hunters or Severance. One day, you too drink kombucha. One day, against your better judgment, you too play pickleball. It’s not so much that you want to do these things; it’s just that you find yourself thinking, “I dunno, maybe I’m missing out on something? Maybe? What the hell, I’ll try it.”

One day, against my better judgment, I bought the book Dungeon Crawler Carl and turned to page one.

For the last year or so I’ve seen Dungeon Crawler Carl (let’s just agree to call it DCC) mentioned on various social media. I thought it was possibly the stupidest book title I’d ever encountered, but beyond that I gave DCC no real thought. Then, about a month ago, my niece mentioned it. We often discuss books and though she’s more sober-minded than I am, I’ve learned to trust her taste. The last time we spoke, she confessed she’d picked up DCC, started to skim it, and couldn’t put it down. She said she was reading the third book in the series. Her husband was on the sixth book.

A few days ago I finished reading a novel and began to cast around for something else to read. Here’s the problem with ebooks; they’re almost designed for impulse buying. I don’t recall what DCC cost, but it was fairly inexpensive. so against my better judgment, I bought it. And started reading it.

Folks, it really is as stupid as it sounds. Possibly even more stupid.

Also? My niece was right; it’s completely engaging. I just bought the second book in the series.

For those of you who are completely and happily unfamiliar with Dungeon Crawler Carl, here’s a brief summary. At 2:23 AM on January 3rd, every structure on Earth that had a roof completely pancaked. Totally flat, smooshing everybody inside (or partially inside).

If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes.

What happens next is…okay, wait, a tangent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, right? Poet, literary critic, philosopher, theologian in the late 18th and early 19th century. You know, In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree, that Coleridge. One of the things our boy Sam came up with was the concept of poetic faith, which he described as the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” Basically, he was saying readers need to relax into a story and not get fussy about its ‘realism.’ This poetic faith is what allows readers (and movie-goers and television watchers) to set aside their logic and accept a world in which librarians solve murders and sword-wielding women in lingerie-armor fight dragons.

Sam Coleridge would applaud Matt Dinniman, the guy who wrote DCC. Right from page one, the reader has to willingly suspend disbelief like a motherfucker. By the end of Chapter One, you not only have to accept that every structure with a roof gets massively smooshed, you have to accept that what’s left of the Earth gets turned into a subterranean reality game show sponsored by some sort of galactic corporation. A game show that echoes every roleplaying video game ever made, in which the survivors of the Great Smooshing become characters fighting monsters (and sometimes each other) as they move through the various levels of the game, while an intergalactic audience watches.

There is absolutely no way this premise should work. I mean, the first five or six chapters are basically a game tutorial. Carl, of course, was NOT inside at 2:23 AM when the Great Smooshing took place. He was outside his Seattle apartment, wearing only a leather jacket, boxer shorts, and a pair of pink Crocs, trying to coax Donut, his ex-girfriend’s prize Persian cat, back inside. Carl and Donut become unwilling contestants in the game.

I am NOT making this up. That’s the story, these two (it’s not a spoiler to tell you Donut becomes sentient and able to speak) fight their way through various levels of the game dungeon. An inordinate amount of time is spent on Carl and Donut setting up their display menus, killing monsters, adding loot to their inventories, gaining game experience, leveling up, assigning skill points.

This should NOT WORK AS A NOVEL. But it does.

Why? For several reasons. First, obviously, is the developing relationship between Carl and Donut. Anybody who has ever shared space with a different species (cat, dog, ferret, snake, doesn’t matter) will identify with this. Like any relationship, it evolves as the characters experience the world and change. The relationship shifts through various stages from ‘Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s annoying cat’ to ‘Carl and Donut.’ And you sense the relationship will continue to evolve in future books.

Second, periodically we’re reminded that the Great Smooshing was an incredibly traumatic event. Not only that, but the injustice of forcing the few survivors to fight for their survival—sometimes against each other—as a form of entertainment is a recurring emotional trauma. And even though the reader knows Carl and Donut will survive their adventures (at least for now), other characters don’t. Carl often has to decide how far he’ll go to survive and/or keep Donut alive. There’s real emotion here.

Third, the story addresses issues involving the entertainment industry in general and game shows in specific, as well as aspects of corporate greed. To improve their slim odds of survival, Carl and Donut need to be popular, to attract fans of the show. That can mean killing in spectacularly gory ways. This is made more problematic when they discover the ‘monsters’ they fight are essentially replaceable slave labor, whose suffering is real.

I used to teach fiction writing. I always told my students that a writer has one overarching job: to get the reader to keep turning the page. Yes, there are hundreds of other things writers need to do, but if you want people to read your work, you have to find ways to make the reader want to turn the page—to need to turn the page, to find out what happens next.

Matt Dinniman does his job well. He’s got me turning pages. Is this art? Nope. Is it literature? Nope. But it’s solid, clever, thoughtful workmanship. I don’t know how many books are in this series. I don’t know if I’ll read them all.

But I know I’ll read the next one.