Broken and wounded in one of the most dangerous places on Earth, David accidentally makes a deal with something that he has only read about in literature.
After a six month long coma he wakes up to find himself crippled and out of work. Driven by forces that are almost outside his control he goes on a quest to learn and understand one of the last things any sane person would wish to know about.
Meanwhile, trapped in a boring, dirty, and thankless job another poor soul watches through a computer screen. Day and night he works tirelessly to stop, trap, and destroy any who would attempt to both steal his home and ruin his life.
My Opinion: 240 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Don’t let the bad cover art or the novel description fool you. This is a surprisingly good story. This is a LitRPG dungeon master/core story that tries really hard to break the few tropes the sub-sub-genre has. For example, early in the story the main character (MC) has the chance, as a dungeon, to bond with an adorable looking fairy to get some cool bonuses. The dungeon’s response? It questions why anyone would trust a random magical creature they just met and why a fairy would be hanging around a dungeon anyway. Then it murders that thing and reveals it to be an evil monster fairy. Bam, trope blown.
That’s the least of the interesting things the author does with dungeon master/core genre. The author also pokes fun at the genre and LitRPG while at the same time firmly establishing some really neat RPG mechanics for the dungeon to use, after the 10% mark. I especially love the dungeon’s ability to convert building materials into coffee which potentially has the power to create an infinite coffee supply. Also, loved the plaque above the coffee machine, “Death for coffee!!” There’s also a rather interesting thread with real world that I don’t want to spoil but a good portion of the story takes place outside of the dungeon as the human core copy of the MC is separated from the dungeon copy of the MC.
I almost gave the story an 8 just for the humor and the attempt at being innovative. However, there are a few graphically violent and gory horror movie-ish scenes that I didn’t care for. It’s not that the scenes are badly written, I’m just not into horror or slasher movies. Also, for a dungeon master/core story, there really isn’t a lot of dungeon building, relative to the size of the novel.
Overall, even though there are a few places I had to push through, I enjoyed reading the story. I really appreciated the cheeky humor and the irreverent attitude towards established LitRPG and dungeon master/core tropes. You could tell the attitude was coming from someone that likes the genres but sees places to improve so they kind of wrote that story they wanted to read.
Score: 7 out of 10