Standard disclaimers! Kara Jorgensen and I are mutuals on basically everything, although we have never met, and which precise social media thing we met on has been lost to the mists of time, at least to me. The Reanimator’s Fate is the fourth and final book of the Reanimator Mysteries series and the fifth of their books I have read. Somehow, this will be the first full review I’ve written of one of them— Book Three, The Reanimator’s Remains, got to share a review post with a couple other books, but somehow I appear not to have mentioned the other two books in the series. I’m not sure why— I’ve liked all four of them.
At any rate: The Reanimator Mysteries are the story of Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, Oliver’s partner and investigator. Both work for the New York Paranormal Society; they aren’t cops, precisely, but the Society gets brought in on investigations that obviously involve magic in some way, so they keep pretty busy.
Oh, and Felipe’s dead, technically, although nearly no one other than the two of them knows that, and the two are linked through a magical tether that allows some limited psychic linkage between them (strong emotions can bleed through, and they can “tug” on the tether to communicate if they want) and keeps them from being able to get too far apart. Oliver and Felipe are a great couple and I love reading about how they interact with one another; the way they balance each other out is fascinating. Oliver’s issues are a little bit more front and center, especially since he’s the primary character, but Felipe needs Oliver just as much as Oliver needs Felipe.
The Reanimator’s Fate begins with a naked man trying to steal a magic book, which promptly turns his blood to ink and exsanguinates him, just in case you were thinking this was just a romance book.
There is a lot going on in this book, above and beyond the central mystery, to the point where I really wasn’t sure Kara was going to be able to pull the ending of the book off successfully with about 20 pages left. The Paranormal Society itself gets a lot of development in a way that I don’t really want to get into to avoid spoilers, and while everything does knit itself together satisfyingly at the end, I feel like the book could maybe have used another 25 pages or so to breathe.
The problem is I really want to talk about the ending, and I can’t do it especially effectively without indulging in spoilers, which I don’t want to do. This is the last book of the Reanimator Mysteries series, and while Kara doesn’t kill off the main characters or anything like that there is a major status quo shift at the end of the book that fully justifies calling this the last book.
What I’m really hoping for, though, is that this is the last Reanimator Mysteries book, but it’s not the last Oliver and Felipe book, because there’s no real reason it has to be. Kara’s wheelhouse is the nineteenth century (have I mentioned this is a period book? It’s a period book.) and following the characters would involve taking them out of that context, but I really want to see it. I don’t know if that’s the plan or not, but it should be, damn it. The people demand more Oliver and Felipe! I am the people!
Meanwhile, you should read the series so you can join in the popular uprising for more books.
Let us take a moment to appreciate this cover, while I collect my thoughts, because I am about to write a review of this book and I’m still not 100% sure what I think of it. So I’ll start with the bit I’m most enthusiastic about, which is that if you’re going to buy this book, get the hardcover, because the paper and the cover feel absolutely amazing in the hand and it looks awesome and it’s somehow less than $10 on Amazon right now. Which … hell, less than $10 for this book may push me into enthusiastic recommendation regardless of whatever else I might think about it.
I was contacted by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist and offered an advance copy of her forthcoming novel From the Depths. That book sounded up my alley, but I hadn’t read the first novel in the series yet, so she went ahead and sent me Of Mountains and Seas, with the idea that I’d read that first and then see if I wanted to read From the Depths as well. I sent a follow-up email at about the 3/4 mark of OM&S asking her to go ahead and pull the trigger on the second book. And this is the part where I want to stare at the screen for a bit, because my opinion on this book is genuinely mixed, but one way or another it’s definitely positive enough that I still want to read the sequel.
Let’s start positive: Of Mountains and Seas is a nicely complicated little novel, with multiple POVs stretched between 1932 or so and the near-present. Parts of the book are set in 1932, 1935, 1936, 1955, 1985, 1990 and 2000, with 2000 being the “now” of the book, and shut up, 2000 isso the “recent” past. There may be another couple of years sprinkled in here and there but that’s good enough for now. There are at least half-a-dozen POV characters, some of whom appear in multiple time periods and some of whom are young enough that we only really see them toward the end of the timeline. Some of them change their names partway through! It can be kinda rough if you’re not paying attention, to be honest. The main thrust of the story is that most of the characters are Shifters, shapeshifters who also possess other magical abilities, almost, but not quite, X-men style— all of them can change shape but some can manipulate rock or affect memories or various other things, and there are also a handful of magical tinctures and other objects as well. Where’s the book set? California, of course, so mostly in the real world. Shifters have their own government set up— indeed, one of the characters is running for office for part of the story— and take careful pains to avoid being noticed by the humans, who they call Statics.
Davis, one of the more important POV characters, is born to a Shifter family, but without powers. This leaves him as an exile within his own family. And then he discovers that special stones exist that will allow him to steal abilities from other Shifters, leaving them powerless (there are also special marks that can be etched into a Shifter’s skin to take away their powers, by the way) and temporarily transferring their powers to him. “Temporarily” can mean for decades or for a much shorter period of time, depending on how powerful the Shifter he stole from was and how often he uses the abilities. At any rate, that kicks off the story, as Davis goes on to make a whole lot of trouble with these stones. Oh, and he also finds a mine full of them.
On a story level, the book is pretty cool. I may actually reread it before I read the sequel; it’s fast, and there’s enough going on that I suspect I’ll need the refresher.
Unfortunately, Emily Renk Hawthorne is one of those writers who consistently violates Twain’s thirteenth rule of writing: Use the right word, not its second cousin. Opening the book to a random page, I see her use pretense when she means pretext. Opening to another, I see someone use the word apparently to describe someone losing a hand, which is not a word someone would use in this particular context. She definitely lost her hand! It’s not there! On the opposite page from that, we have a clunky bit of dialogue where someone reads a cop’s full name to them off of, specifically, their badge. First, you would not say “Thank you, Officer… Brad Smith,” because that’s not how people talk. Second, their badges don’t have full names. Police badges don’t have names at all, in fact! His name may be on his chest somewhere, but it’s almost certainly his rank and last name and maybe a first initial, and that’s gonna be it. There’s lots of stuff like this, lots of little violations of logic and words that are 90 degrees away from being the right word for the context. This will bother some of you more than others. It’s the same exact problem I have with Ryan Cahill, actually. And, interestingly, I begin a review of one of his books by praising the book for the exact same physical things I just praised Hawthorne’s about. I wonder if they used the same printer?
At any rate, this book could have used a bit more editing, so your enjoyment of it will depend directly upon how much the good story distracts you from the less-good writing. I went back and forth; I barely noticed any issues with the first half of the book, then there was one particular chapter that was riddled with problems, and after that I either got a lot more critical or the book got sloppier because I started noticing stuff all over the place. Again, I’m in for the sequel even if I end up having to buy it myself, I’m just hoping for a slightly stronger sophomore effort on the prose front.
I’ve not had any diversity-related reading goals for several years now, but that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly on the lookout for books by authors from underrepresented groups, so when The Door On The Sea was represented to me as “a Tlingit Lord of the Rings” I bought it damn near immediately. And, in the way of such things, it perhaps lingered on my Unread Shelf for too long— most books linger on my Unread Shelf for too long nowadays— but now that I’ve read it, I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, and it’ll be devoured quickly once it shows up.
Forget the Lord of the Rings comparison, by the way; the books have little in common other than being journey-focused and party-based fantasy, and Door mostly takes place in an outrigger canoe rather than on foot and horseback, and there’s a clearly identifiable main character instead of LOTR’s omniscient third person. There’s a shapeshifter and a foul-mouthed talking raven, though, and that’s cool.
The main character is Elān, a young Storyteller— basically a bard and a scholar— who is dispatched along with several warriors to recover a lost weapon belonging to an immensely dangerous invading enemy race called the Koosh, who are posing a threat to everything and everyone Elān knows. If you’re wondering why a bard might be put in charge of such a journey, don’t worry; Elān is too, and everyone constantly questions his leadership despite him ending up being fairly level-headed and good in a tight situation. Elān is the grandson of a legendary warrior and he secretly wishes to be a warrior himself, but the others on the journey with him constantly call him a Bookeater, which seems to more or less be warrior slang for “nerd” despite being an objectively badassed thing to be called. It’s not entirely clear what the Koosh are; sometimes they come off as basically orcs, but they may actually be from another dimension, and the one Koosh that gets some dialogue and page time turns out to be really fascinating. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about this world in future books. This isn’t exactly a YA novel, but there’s definitely some coming-of-age stuff going on with Elān and his youth and inexperience and, well, softness are an ongoing theme in the book.
Speaking of “a lot going on,” the book is told in the style of an oration around a campfire, and there are even some hints that the teller— probably not Elān, but who knows— knows that people on Earth in 2026 are reading the book. I can’t find the passage to quote it directly, but there’s a bit where the narrator refers to an animal by its indigenous name, then a brief aside something along the lines of “in your world, you’d call it a moon jellyfish,” which … well, I also don’t know what a moon jellyfish looks like, but whatever.
A quick word about the language in the book; you may have noticed that diacritical mark on Elān and wondered how it was pronounced, and unfortunately I have to tell you I haven’t the slightest idea. Russell doesn’t hold anyone’s hand with spelling, and there’s no pronunciation guide in the book. On top of that, there are diacritical marks in this book that I’ve never seen in any other context, and I feel like I probably have more experience with languages than a lot of people do. There’s a character named Snaak, for example, and yes, that K is underlined on purpose, and I don’t know why. Or, just to pick a couple more words, xaax’w or axxoonx’iyán, which means silence-sharing friend, or Kusaxakwáan, which is the land of the cannibal giants. Yeah, there are cannibal giants. They may not be cannibals, though. There’s a whole thing. Word meanings are always clear from context, but man, I feel like the audiobook narrator might have gone through hell on this book, and I almost want to listen to it just to find out how to pronounce some of this stuff.
One way or another, though, big thumbs up. Check this one out.
Bear with me, if you will: before I review this book, I have to review this book. As in, the object made of paper and cardboard that can be held in your hands. I have amassed a lot of special editions and Special Editions over the last couple of years— I have an entire bookshelf where the books are arranged spine-in so that the pretty painted edges are visible, and yes, I can still tell you what damn near all of them are anyway.
I have two copies of Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. One of them is a book-box special edition from Illumicrate. The other is, supposedly, the regular edition, the one you’ll get from Amazon or if you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore.
The regular edition may very well be the prettiest book I own.
If you love books at all as art objects in and of themselves, go grab this book right now before this printing sells out, because I doubt future editions are going to look like this first one. Don’t read another word; the story doesn’t matter, this book is that pretty and you want to own it so you can look at it. I am going to have to figure out a way to display this one front-facing. The endpapers are gorgeous, the edges are gilded beautifully, and the cover has this lovely sparkly texture on it that I can neither take nor find a decent picture of. It just doesn’t come through properly in photographs. Go buy this book, right now.
Oh, you want to read it? Yeah, you should do that too, because I know it’s only mid-February and things change but right now I feel like this is going to be high in the running for my favorite book of the year. I think the last time I was this impressed by a debut novel wasJade City. Which I think wasn’t actually Fonda Lee’s debut, but it was the first of her books I read. Close enough. It’s matching my enthusiasm for To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which … I also compared to Jade City. Along with Scarlet Odyssey. And Iron Widow, so maybe I’m overusing this particular comparison, but the point is I really loved all of those books. This is up there with them.
It’s totally prettier than all of them, though.
Anyway, the story: the main character, Wei Yin, is a peasant girl living in the backwoods of a famine-ridden, crumbling empire controlled by the Azalea Dynasty. The empire is, more or less, Not China; roll with it. The emperor is dying, and has chosen his second son, Prince Terren, as his successor, and Prince Terren is seeking a bride. He has sent emissaries all over the country seeking out women who wish to compete for the honor of marrying him. Wei Yin manages to get herself selected, in hope that she will be able to marry the prince and use her influence to save her family and her village from the famine. Prince Terren, unfortunately, quickly turns out to be a horrible bastard.
Now, I’m gonna be honest: at first glance this doesn’tsound great. Does the phrase “enemies-to-lovers romantasy” mean anything to you? Because even the marketing for this book has been leaning into this, and you are just going to have to trust me that this book absolutely is not a romantasy and is far too intricate for such nonsense as “tropes.” Terren and Wei Yin are both impressively complex, layered characters, and … well, I’m not spoiling anything, but this is absolutely not an enemies-to-lovers book. Why is the book called The Poet Empress? Because much of this world’s magic is based on poetry, and when Wei Yin decides that her best bet is to murder Prince Terren, she realizes that the only way she’s going to be able to do it is to write a very particular kind of poem, one that requires her to know and understand the target on an immensely intimate level.
Oh, it’s illegal for women to be able to read, by the way. Which sorta complicates things.
I know, I know, some of you are shaking your heads. Of course she’s going to marry the prince. The damn book is called The Poet Empress, not The Peasant Girl Who Came In Twenty-Third and Got Her Head Chopped Off. I promise you no other aspect of this book is going to be predictable, and the “competition” is dispensed with much more quickly than you think it’s going to. And once that happens the book can get on with its actual goal, which is sinking its claws into you and slowly tearing your heart out. You will be fifteen pages from the end of the book and you will still not know how it’s going to turn out.
It’s also dark as hell, so be prepared for that; Terren is terrible, and Wei Yin is put through some absolutely terrible things as a result of being connected to him, much less actually married to him. On top of that, many of the women who didn’t win the competition are fairly powerful and well-connected in their own rights, and a number of them immediately decide to kill her. And then there’s the dowager empress, who is also unhappy with her son’s choice of bride. And the prince who got passed over in favor of his younger brother. Comparatively, dying of famine in a squalid village almost feels quaint.
This is brilliant fucking work, guys, and I cannot wait for more from Shen Tao. Go get this book right now. Even if you just look at it, it’s worth the money. The fact that there’s an amazing story in there is a bonus.
Before you read this review, which is of the second book in the Blood at the Root series, I’d like you to read my review of the first book, Blood at the Root. Why? Because it’s kind of fascinating just how cleanly my reading experience of Bones paralleled my reading of Blood:
I definitely and absolutely have had Malik in my classroom before. Even more so in this book than in the previous one, honestly; Williams calls Malik “messy” in his Author’s Foreword to this book, and I feel like Malik’s messiness, and to be more specific, his temper, maybe hurts him more in this book than it does in Blood. This is a kid who has been handed a raw deal by life on a ton of different levels (the magic kinda makes it better, I imagine) but one way or another he doesn’t handle it like a grown-up. Why? He’s not one.
Watching Malik navigate romantic relationships? Also super familiar.
I would say the moment where Williams absolutely stomps on the accelerator is closer to the 2/3 mark of the book than the halfway point, but while Blood came close to making me cry a couple of times– something that, let me repeat, almost never happens while I’m reading– page 368 absolutely 100% got me. Like, a literal gasp, and a well of pride, and I’m not going to pretend I was sobbing or anything but there were actual real tears.
I am not enough of a nerd that I’m going to figure out exactly what percentage of the book was finished at page 368, and you can’t make me.
NO.
It’s 67.6%, so my estimate was right on the money, fuck you.
Anyway, I referenced “twists and turns and betrayals” in the first review, and … YEAH. Along with some major reveals and some major shake-ups of what you thought you knew from the first book.
And then the Goddamned thing ends on a cliffhanger, and … remember when I was reading Godsgrave, a million years ago, and I said that I’d never been happier to have the sequel of a book on hand before finishing it? The sequel to Bones at the Crossroads hasn’t even got a release date yet, so LaDarrion Williams is about to acquire a new, and very impatient, roommate.
I will ding the book a tiny bit for dragging occasionally before that pedal-to-the-metal moment that carries through the rest of the story, and it doesn’t mean a whole lot to say this is the best book I’ve read so far this year on January 7th, but this was real real good and if you haven’t read Blood at the Root, go pick that up, and read slowly, and maybe by the time you finish Bones the end of the trilogy will be available.
A warning: I haven’t even written it yet, and I feel like this review might be a little unfair, so adjust your expectations accordingly. This is the third Travis Baldree book I’ve read and the third review I’ve written of his books, which means that I’ve cursed at autocorrect for changing “Baldree” to “Balder” approximately one hundred and forty thousand times.
I loved his first two books. Legends & Lattes was my second-favorite book of 2023 and Bookshops & Bonedust, the prequel follow-up, was an honorable mention. And I’m going to be a bit of a wanker and quote myself in my write-up of L&L for the Best Books of the Year post:
The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it.
And Brigands and Breadknives is about Fern, the ratkin bookseller from Bookshops & Bonedust, so it’s still not a book about Viv and Tandri. Now, I knew this going in! Fern’s right there on the cover, and Viv and Tandri are nowhere to be seen. But I figured that since it was at least a chronological sequel to L&L, we’d have a good amount of both of them in there anyway, right?
Not only do we get very little of Viv and nothing of Tandri, the book starts with Fern screwing both of them over, and to make things worse, abandoning Potroast, who was absolutely the best thing about the second book. This book is basically about Fern’s character flaws. I mean, there’s other stuff going on, but I came very close to abandoning this book, which was shocking to me. And what makes this somewhat unfair is that I’m basically punishing the book because Travis Baldree, for the second book in a row, didn’t write the book I wanted him to write, which … isn’t exactly his job as an author? But I didn’t like Fern as a character nearly as much as Viv and Tandri going in, and when Fern gets drunk and pulls a huge asshole move within the first few chapters, I switched from “I don’t like her as much as I like these two characters I really like and this cool pug-owlbear thing” to “I don’t like this character at all, and I want the people I liked back.”
I dunno. It’s not a bad book. I can’t and won’t make that claim. It has a lot of the same strengths that made the previous two books such a pleasure to read, so it’s entirely possible that someone else with slightly different preferences about the characters might have different feelings, and I wouldn’t argue with someone who really liked it. But, man, it just wasn’t what I was looking for, and I still want my damn Viv and Tandri book. They got married! OFF-SCREEN! Write that goddamn book, Travis Baldree!
A slight sidenote, and I’m gonna quote myself again, because I suck:
I need a word for the precise moment when you realize you're not enjoying something you really hoped was going to be awesome.
The original coverThe new coverThe “are you fucking kidding me” cover of the sequelThe main cover of the sequel
I make bad decisions, guys, and it seems like James Islington’s books are just absolutely committed to proving that at their every opportunity.
Islington has written, to my knowledge, five books. I own six of his books. I have read three and a quarter of them. I have liked one of them. I bought and read The Shadow of What Was Lost, the first book of his Licanius trilogy, three years ago. I did not like it very much, but the book as a physical object was remarkable, and I bought the entire trilogy before finishing the first book. I made it, if I remember correctly, less than 25% of the way through the second book before deciding I was done and putting it away. Other than placing it on the shelf and perhaps moving it to a different shelf once or twice, I have barely touched the third book and have never opened it.
Somehow, this did not prevent me from buying The Will of the Many when it came out– and I bought the original cover, the one with the columns up there. I read it and quite liked it– the world building was a little shallow, and the plot not especially unique; every “brilliant young person goes to a Special School” book is gonna have some major similarities, but the Rome-inflected world was at least interesting if, again, not very deeply thought-out, but whatever.
Then I started seeing the book on shelves with a whole new cover. You know this about me; I like my shit to look nice and clean, and midseries changes to covers annoy me tremendously, and I didn’t want to buy a second copy of the first book just to match the second on the shelf.
And then they made an announcement that all copies of The Strength of the Few would have reversible covers, one to match each version of the original cover! My understanding is that Islington himself was behind that decision, which I both support and tremendously appreciate. My man knows his audience! Good on you.
The fucking word “Hierarchy,” the title of the series, was spelled wrong on the spine.
I swore– a lot– and then said “Fuck it, this is why I have a job” and bought a new copy of the first book so that it would match. I cannot display a fucking spelling error on my bookshelves. Unimaginable.
(Right about here is where I’m going to stop reviewing myself and start reviewing the books, btdubs.)
I decided that since I was getting a new copy of the book anyway, I’d reread Will before diving into Strength. This, I feel, was the right move. I read so much that most of the time I have read literally hundreds of books in between any given book and its sequel, which means that I frequently don’t enjoy sequels as much as I should because I simply don’t recall the first book as well as I should. And I’d already had one Islington series go sour on me, and I didn’t want it to happen again.
The Will of the Many was an excellent read the second time through as well. It’s a genuinely good book. I stand behind it.
The Strength of the Few … was not. I’ve got it three-starred on the various book services right now and I genuinely might move it down to two. And the most frustrating thing is that a lot of the problems with Licanius are showing themselves again in Hierarchy. It was okay that there wasn’t a whole lot of clarity about how the wider world worked in Will, because the main character was confined to this little school on a tiny island and wasn’t really interacting with the wider world, so when you’ve split the … government? into Religion, Governance and Military and not really defined what it means to be “in Religion”, or when you have a couple of characters who are in the Senate, because this world is based on Rome somehow so there has to be one of those, but haven’t actually really said what the Senate is for, you can get away with it. But you’ve got to broaden that scope out in any sequel, especially when you end Book One, which was mostly a hunt for What Really Happened to the MC’s adoptive father’s brother, by splitting the entire universe into three parallel planes. At that point, I would like to understand how all this works. The main character exists in all three worlds in book two, only at least two of the three versions of him don’t know that he’s in all three worlds, and one of them is Egypt-except-not, and one of them is, bewilderingly, Wales-except-not.(*)
It means that the world you’ve learned about in the first book is only a third of the second book, and the other two worlds genuinely aren’t very interesting (not-Egypt is better than not-Wales, but not by much) and that’s before he starts sidelining and/or killing every interesting female character in the first book, and it’s also before you hit the No One You Thought Was Dead Is Still Dead part of the book, which is just fucking annoying.
There’s also a form of magic called Will, and an interesting setup in not-Rome where society has organized itself into pyramids where everyone pledges part of their Will to the people above them, and Will does stuff but it’s not entirely clear that Islington has figured out the parameters of what it can do, nor is it clear to me why holding someone’s hand and saying “I cede you my Will,” or whatever the code phrase is, lets them take part of your life essence away from you. It’s rigorously codified without actually making a whole lot of sense, which is not a great combination. I feel like if you poked the whole system too hard it would collapse.
(Even the school the MC attends in the first book was … kinda sketchy, as far as the worldbuilding goes. It’s also organized into tiers, and the MC moves from seventh tier to third over the course of a single semester, but everybody seems to be the same age and it’s not at all clear how often or even whether anyone graduates, or how long they’re supposed to be there, or really even what they’re studying; dude mentions that his classes are getting harder a few times but never really says why, and nothing is ever difficult for him, really.)
I damn near DNFed the second James Islington Series Volume II in a row, is what I’m saying here. It’s just not nearly as good as the first book, and again, much like the first series, I feel like the central conflict is not well defined here. The first book was a pretty straightforward “find out what happened to this guy” thing, and it got more complicated than that but that was basically what was going on. Now there’s a Cataclysm every three hundred years (what happens during a Cataclysm? Bad stuff, but … don’t ask what kind! People die, alright?(**) It’s bad!) and apparently we’re going to stop it somehow, I guess, and something something worlds got split up, and …
<spits>
Blech.
Again, I’m an idiot, so I’ll probably pick up the third volume when it comes out (I hope there are only planned to be three, but who knows) just for completeness’ sake, because it would really piss me off to have two copies of the first book, one of the second, and not have the third) but I think I probably have to be done with this guy after that unless everything really turns around.
(*) This got me thinking about how Rome and Alexandria, two massively different cultures, are only 1200 miles apart. That’s about the distance from northern Indiana to Houston.)
(**) The phrase “all right,” which is two words, not one, and I will let you get away with “alright” in dialogue but not much else, is misspelled every single time it appears in both books. I hate it.
Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.
Oh well. Scrolling’s free.
I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.
I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.
I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.
I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.
These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.
Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.
Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.
