Dungeon Crawler Carl

 Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, 450 pages.

It's sheer dumb luck that finds Carl outside in the middle of the night, chasing his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend's prize-winning cat in too-small slippers and boxers, when every structure on the planet's surface is smashed flat in an instant. His only option now is descending into a planet-spanning dungeon freshly constructed under the planet's surface. He's on TV! Dungeon Crawler World is an intergalactic gameshow modeled on classic dungeon crawling video games, and survival is winning. 

This book was astoundingly fun, and honestly the official blurb does a better job selling it than I did. This first book in the series covers floors one and two of the dungeon, and does so in a way that's both fast-paced and very funny. What impresses me more, as a sign of good craft, is that Dinniman managed to write a character who doesn't disrupt that furthers the comedy aspects while being effected like a normal human being by the frankly staggering death toll of what is realistically an ongoing extinction event. I had a very hard time putting this book down, and "one more chaptered" myself late into the night multiple times while reading it. I'm very excited to get my hands on the second book in the series.