Axel Nanol

OK, so continuing with the spoiler free reviews, several months on.

Let's get something out the way first, I had heard, and it was the only thing I had heard, that you've got to persevere with the first few books in the Cradle series. The people who said that are Not Wrong: this is a tough read, though not without some fun moments.

The Good: Sacred Valley world building (deliciously cozy slice of life), the fresh meta narrative (there is a lot going on), and, to a lesser extent, our secondary protagonist, who joins us later on. And all libraries and treasure rooms.

The Bad: the main character's portrayal in this one is poor. I get that skin crawling feeling where an author spends too long writing about trivial stuff, really dumb hand wringing, just throwing anything in there to get the word count up.

The Ugly: oh man, the antagonists are a mess here. And for a Progression Fantasy, this book specifically shows surprising restraint in actually progressing.

All this not withstanding, I was sufficiently invested to carry on the series. The MC is such a quintessential underdog that you hope for a brighter future for him, both power curve-wise and to get him a personality upgrade. It will just be a long, long journey before he gets there.

Let's try a spoiler-free review here...

Wanted to give it a month or two to mull over DCC before reviewing it. I'm now half way through book 3, and have made an active effort to try out other genre staples to have something to compare it to. It holds up very well indeed.

Whilst the sequels certainly deliver on a strong initial premise, the joy of this first foray into Crawler World is really the density of the jokes. There is no fat to trim at all, every sentence either immediately hilarious or contributing to a future call-back.

And of the humour, I should say, because I haven't seen this written enough elsewhere, this is a comedy first, drama and action second. It's top tier funny, the Stewart Lee of its genre. I'll casually reference some other positive comparisons from my own life experience: Red Dwarf seasons 3&4+novels perhaps, the moment I heard Still Alive for the first time at the end of Portal, and a joke from a Robert Rankin book about a bowl of festering fruit, where I genuinely thought I was going to die laughing. Well DCC joins that illustrious group.

Despite the world-weary demeanour of the protagonist, Dinniman treats the role-playing tropes he packs the book with affectionately. A satisfyingly consistent set of rules is expounded to the reader - things always function as well or better than you expect. That goes for Carl himself too; he is no loser or underdog, he's a calculated risk-taking pragmatist who gets things done in spite of his surroundings - a modern day Yossarian from Catch-22. This approach treats the reader with more respect than most in the genre, where it appears a couple of hundred page hand-wringing monologue on the smallest subject is common.

I'll skip the plot here and only say it's both engaging and a great setup for future instalments. Like some of my favourite books which contain action scenes, I've found myself thinking back enthusiastically and wondering how they'd commit certain parts to film. My goodness the set pieces are fun and inventive!

Finally it would be wrong not to acknowledge Jeff Hays' audio narration as contributing to the success of this book. What a talent!