Somewhere beneath the surface of a world remade by a sadistic alien game show, a man and his cat have become famous enough to have a price on their heads. That is, remarkably, only the third-strangest sentence a reader could write about Matt Dinniman’s “The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook,” the third installment in his runaway LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, and it is exactly the kind of gleeful, deadpan absurdity that has turned this saga into one of publishing’s more unlikely juggernauts.
The book drops Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, the imperious Princess Donut, into the Iron Tangle: an impossibly tangled subway system where steam engines, bullet trains, and rattling boxcars are all knotted together into a single floor of the dungeon. Stations aren’t always what they claim to be, the cars are stalked by monsters built for maximum unpleasantness, and the exit is perpetually described as just a few stops away, which is to say nowhere close. Having clawed their way onto the game’s top ten leaderboard, Carl and Donut now carry the dubious prize of a bounty on their heads, forcing them into uneasy alliances with fellow “crawlers” whose loyalties are impossible to verify. At the center of it all sits the titular cookbook itself, a battered, passed-down volume in which generations of contestants have scribbled crafting recipes, survival tips, and hard-won advice on class builds and what horrors wait deeper in the dungeon.
What makes the book work is Dinniman’s refusal to let the joke run out of gas. The world-building around the Iron Tangle is dense and inventive without tipping into homework, and the game-mechanic bookkeeping that defines the LitRPG genre is deployed with enough narrative sleight of hand that it rarely slows the plot. More impressive is the tonal high-wire act: scenes of bawdy, splatstick combat sit comfortably beside genuine grief and found-family warmth, and Carl’s exhausted, sardonic voice keeps the whole enterprise from curdling into empty spectacle. Donut, meanwhile, continues to be one of the funniest and most quietly poignant creations in recent genre fiction, a cat with the ego of a monarch and, increasingly, the loyalty of a true friend.
Critical and reader response to this entry has largely mirrored the series’ broader reputation: praise for a book that keeps finding new emotional depth under its gonzo premise, admiration for how confidently it expands its cast and setting without losing narrative momentum, and acknowledgment that Dinniman’s blend of crude humor and sincere feeling is a tightrope walk that, three books in, still hasn’t produced a wobble. The most common caveat isn’t really a criticism so much as a warning label: this is a series that rewards commitment, and readers who parachute in at book three without the earlier installments will find themselves playing catch-up on lore, stats, and running jokes that have been accumulating since Carl first fell into the dungeon.
For anyone already invested in Carl and Donut’s increasingly unhinged fight for survival, “The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook” delivers everything that made this series a bestseller in the first place, and then some. It is funnier, weirder, and somehow more emotionally sturdy than a book about a subway full of monsters has any right to be, and it cements Dinniman’s series as one of the genre’s most entertaining ongoing experiments.
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