I worked at a literary agency, and Dungeon Crawler Carl is unlike anything I've ever read I spent years as a story editor at a film production company and before that at a literary agency. My whole job was reading, evaluating structure, character, voice. So when I tell you I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl with a lot of skepticism, you can imagine the bias. I've never read anything like it. And I want to be honest about its limits, because I notice them, the prose isn't elegant, some of the beats are repetitive, structurally it does things a literary editor would flag immediately. But none of that ends up mattering, and that's what I find genuinely interesting. What Dinniman pulls off is a kind of momentum and emotional honesty that a lot of "well-written" books I've worked on never came close to. The book has stakes. The characters earn their weight. The gore and the absurdity aren't there for shock, they're load-bearing parts of the world.…