cyphomandra | Entries tagged with matt dinniman

This inevitable ruin, Matt Dinniman
The luckiest girl in the school, Angela Brazil
The madcap of the school, Angela Brazil
A patriotic school girl, Angela Brazil
What did you eat yesterday 1,2, Fumi Yoshinaga
She loves to cook and she loves to eat 2,3, Sakaomi Yozaki
Dick Fight Island 1, Reibun Ike
A coming evil, Vivian van Velde

This Inevitable Ruin, Matt Dinniman. Book seven in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I read this serially on Patreon but stopped several chapters before the end so I could read it all in one glorious binge.

( “Spoilers.” )

The luckiest girl in the school, Angela Brazil
The madcap of the school, Angela Brazil
A patriotic school girl, Angela Brazil

I’m doing a talk on WWI in vintage children’s books and these are for the first part - books written/published roughly contemporaneously with the war itself. Will post separately but these are standard Brazils, complete with plucky uniquely named heroines, escapades, and triumphant resolutions. The war part is most interesting in the last.

What Did You Eat Yesterday, v 1&2, Fumi Yoshinaga (reread). Such a soothing series. I am intending to read all my copies in order as I own up to 19 and I haven’t read past seven due to various house moves and not being able to find them all at once. I was meaning to make more notes but I ended up just writing down recipe ideas.

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, v 2&3, Sakaomi Yozaki. Nomoto Yuki relaxes by cooking, posting pictures of her creations to social media, but she doesn’t have much of an appetite. Her neighbour two doors down, Kasuga Totoko, accepts her offer of spare food one night when Yuki has cooked too much; Totoko loves food but was raised in a conservative family where men took priority. Slow burn relationship wise, this is a great manga about food and identity and community, and although it’s comforting, it’s not comfortable - it deals with sexism, homophobia, mental health issues and other social stresses, as well as the joy of sharing food you love with someone you love. It’s interesting to read with What Did You Eat Yesterday, which is really a generation earlier (there’s an obvious social media divide). Kinokuniya only had these volumes when I visited but I’ve subsequently tracked down 1&4, and 5 is out. There’s a live-action adaption that is meant to be good.

A Coming Evil, Vivan Van Velde. Conuly recommended this as a much better long-dead ghost occupied France holocaust novel, and it is! Much more grounded, and smaller stakes - but that means it’s about the survival of one small group of desperate people rather than an escape route saving hundreds, and it makes it more tense rather than less, because there are so many ways for them to be lost. Lisette’s parents send her out of Paris to her aunt’s farm in 1940; her aunt is hiding Jewish and Romani orphans. Lisette, who gets on badly with her cousin, stomps out at one point and meets the ghost of Gerard, a Knight Templar from the 14th century, when King Philip IV of France had arrested the Knights, framed them for heresy, tortured them for false confessions and, coincidentally, acquired all their assets. As such, he’s a more convincing addition than Catherine de Medici. Tense, with good emotion through lines, and a lack of tidy resolution that works.

Dick Fight Island, v1, Reibun Ike. A fantastic choice of English title for a manga that is called “The Eight Warriors” in Japanese. Harto returns to his homeland, a secret eight-island archipelago, in order to take part in a 4-yearly tournament (the Great Wyrm) that will determine the overall ruler - naturally, this consists of one-on-one contests between each island’s champions in which whoever comes first loses. Over time the champions have created elaborate penis armour as well as fiendish strategies such as vibrating whips (oh, and I should mention that in this island, once boys become men they are allowed to show their ass at all times) BUT Harto, who has been studying at an American college overseas, is the first champion ever to have discovered the secret of the prostate gland. Everyone in this story is totally committed to the premise and the art, especially the penis armour, is great. I made my sister buy me volume 2 when she went to Kinokuniya.

I have written up half the gaming but I can't find the file so here, books from October. Best of the month were Katherine Arden's Small Spaces series, perfectly seasonal middle grade horror.

Our wild farming life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger
Gate of the feral gods, Matt Dinniman, audiobook
The rest of us just live here, Patrick Ness
The striker and the clock, Georgia Cloepfil
Delay of game, Ari Baran
The girl who couldn’t lie, Radhika Sanghani
The school on the moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce
By honour bound, Bessie Marchant
The new prefect, Dorothea Moore
Pas de don’t, Chloe Angyal
A soundtrack for falling in love, Arden Powell
Mark cooper versus America, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Small spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead voices, Katherine Arden
Dark waters, Katherine Arden
Empty smiles, Katherine Arden

( Cut for length. )

Three twins at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley
Dust up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley
Cat + gamer 4, Wataru Nadatani
Cat + gamer 5, Wataru Nadatani
Biography of x, Catherine Lacey
The Paris novel, Ruth Reichl
Delicious!, Ruth Reichl
We could be so good, Cat Sebastian
You should be so lucky, Cat Sebastian
A sorceress comes to call, T Kingfisher
All that we know, Shilo Kino
The heroines of SOE,Beryl E Escott
Home ice advantage, Ari Baran
I know you did it, Sue Wallman
The nightingale, Kristin Hannah
Backstage, Lorna Hill (re-read)
Carl's doomsday scenario, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The dungeon anarchist’s cookbook, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (re-read)

( Cut for length. )

One of us knows, Alyssa Cole
The decagon house murders, Yukito Ajatsuji
Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold
Running a love story, Dom Harvey
The duke at hazard, KJ Charles
Dungeon crawler Carl (audio)
The night war, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley

One of Us Knows, Alyssa Coles. Although she’s still doing romances she is also now doing thrillers - this is the first of them I’ve read. Kenetria Nash, who has DID and a life she’s managed to effectively wreck, finds herself taking a job as caretaker to an historic home on an island, a decision made by an alter who is now absent. The house seems to be triggering memories, and then people from Ken’s past show up, bringing new dangers with them. The thing I liked most about this was that it is explicitly set during the pandemic; otherwise it’s a little predictable. Readable, though, and I will look out for her other thrillers.

The Decagon House Murders, Yukito Ayatsuji. A university detective club (all using the names of famous writers) travel to a remote island with a ten-sided house and a bloody past. Overnight, someone puts out nameplates - First Victim, Second Victim, Detective, Murderer, etc - and then the bodies, obligingly, arrive soon after. This does have a good mystery and the one-line reveal is very nice, but balanced against that is a near complete lack of personality in all the characters. It made me think about Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which also has a great text-based reveal, but Levin is much stronger in character and tension (which interact anyway in this sort of murder mystery; you want to be worried about who will be killed next rather than being a little unsure who they were). Interestingly one of the indistinguishable two women is called Orczy (the other is Christie) - I hadn’t been aware she’d done detective stories and will have to have a look.

Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson. Middle school graphic novel. Quiet shy Emmie and outgoing athletic Katie meet up when Emmie accidentally drops an embarrassing note that is found by unsympathetic classmates. There are some nice bits in this but the twist doesn’t really come off and overall it’s just okay.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship, not knowing why he’s there or what he’s supposed to do; gradually he works it out, makes first contact with an alien race, and saves humanity. This reminded me of being in my teens and reading sf for the cool high concept ideas, when I would probably have enjoyed this more. The main character - a high school science teacher whose brilliant ideas about alien life were rejected by the mainstream science community, who have been forced to come crawling back to him for help - is pretty irritating, and his big character reveal - that he did not volunteer for the mission but was press-ganged into it - does not actually have any effect by the time it arrives. I did like the alien.

Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold. Gold won multiple medals and championships as a figure skater, including Olympic bronze; she did this despite (or perhaps because of) severe mental health issues, abusive coaches, and a sport with destructive expectations of perfection and femininity. It’s very strong on mental health and self-knowledge; it is also candid in admitting she doesn’t have the answers, and everything is a work in progress. (TW: Gold is raped by a fellow skater; she is also friends with another skater who is very helpful with her recovery and return to the sport, and then kills himself the day after being suspended by US Figure Skating after multiple accusations of sexual assault, and the book covers her confusion and shock at this double revelation).

Running: a love story , Dom Harvey. Dom is a radio DJ who ran as a kid, then took it up again as an out-of-condition adult and became obsessed with trying to beat the 3 hour mark for the marathon in one of the World Majors. This book finishes with his attempt in Berlin, where he gets a PB but fails to break 3 hours; subsequently he does break that time in Tokyo (there’s a later edition of this book that adds a chapter to include this, which definitely works better as an ending). It is not great writing, is obviously intended for the radio fans market, and it’s not that helpful about running, but it did make me interested in Dom’s mum, a longtime marathon runner (the whole family runs), who fitted her runs in around everybody else when the kids were young, and is still running marathons in her 70s.

The Duke at Hazard, KJ Charles. Unassuming Cassian, the Duke of Severn, loses his heirloom ring to a strange man in a secret liaison; he then takes a bet from his cousin that he couldn’t survive as an ordinary person in the hope of getting it back without anyone finding out (and also in the hope of getting his relatives to actually see him as a person). He meets Daizell, disgraced and excluded from society by his father’s crimes, eking out a living as a cutter out of shadow portraits, and hires him to help, but Daizell doesn’t know who Cass really is… This was perfectly enjoyable but I do prefer my KJ Charleses with a bit more bite to them (also, England appears to be populated by about a dozen people, given how frequently everyone bumps into each other). I did like the bit where Daizell demonstrates to Cass exactly how prone to misinterpretation the description of a coat as “mulberry” is and the card game exposure is great.

The night war, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. I really liked her The War that Saved my Life duology. This is also WWII, where 12 year old Miriam escapes the round-up in Paris that takes her entire Jewish neighbourhood, to end up in a convent school in a small French village near the border with the free French zone. She is desperate to leave, but also determined to find her Paris neighbour’s young child, given to her to protect but taken away by the nuns to give to a local childless family. This story makes the bold and unexpected decision to add the ghost of Catherine de Medici as a major character, who is only visible to Miri (her chosen gardener) and I don’t think it works. I spent the second half of the book getting increasingly irked by this and it was not helped by an epilogue that had a surprising number of people survive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, audiobook by Jeff Hays. I do not usually listen to audiobook (except with the kids) but I love this series and the audiobooks are meant to be good, so I plunged in. It’s great. Hays somehow manages all the voices (there are various effects, eg on the AI’s voice and when the characters are speaking in chat - Donut always chats in all caps and Jeff conveys this expertly) and the YouTube cold reads I’ve seen of him swapping between characters aare amazing. The slower pace also makes me think about bits of the story a bit more and appreciate the world building. I think there is a full cast version of this out now as well but I’m now in the third audiobook and I feel I am incapable of dealing with new versions of the voices.

Tales from Watership Down, Richard Adams
Fangirl Down, Tessa Bailey
Home Front, Kristin Hannah
Here we go again, Alison Cochrun
The butcher’s masquerade (re-read), Matt Dinniman
Spectred Isle (re-read), KJ Charles
The eye of the bedlam bride (re-read), Matt Dinniman
The miscalculations of lightning Girl, Stacy McAnulty
Top secret, Elle Kennedy & Sarina Bowen
The oak and the ash, Annick Trent

I've put these behind a spoiler cut for length but there aren't any major spoilers - ( Here. )

Best this month were Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory (queer space opera YA with a great character arc) and Matt Dinniman’s latest in the Dungeon Crawler Carl sequence, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, a series which continues to be my most favourite ongoing series (that isn't manga) while being incredibly hard to convince people to read.

Better than people, Roan Parrish
One Piece, v1, Eiichiro Oda
Role Playing, Cathy Yardley
Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
The New Guy, Sabrina Bowen
I’m Your Guy, Sabrina Bowen
Sunny Side Up, Jennifer L Holm, Matthew Holm
The Marquis Who Mustn’t, Courtney Milan
The renegades of Pern, Anne McCaffrey
All the weyrs of Pern, Anne McCaffrey
The masterharper of Pern, Anne McCaffrey
The Year of the Lucy, Anne McCaffrey
The Last Summer, Helen Griffiths
The Magpie Lord, KJ Charles (re-read)
All the Skills 1, Honour Rae
All the Skills 2, Honour Rae
I Will Find You, Harlan Coben
The Eye of the Bedlam Bride: Dungeon Crawler Car book 6, Matt Dinniman
Thornhedge, Ursula Vernon
Foxglove copse, Alex Beecroft

( Cut for length. )

Dungeon Crawler Carl
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
The Gate of the Feral Gods

All by Matt Dinniman; the first four books in the ongoing Dungeon Crawler Carl series (I have also read the first few chapters of the fifth book, which are up on royal road). This is LitRPG/GameLit, fiction that recreates computer RPG conventions not just with regard to plot and tropes, but with stats, upgrades, loot boxes, etc for the characters and wait, wait, where are you all going? Yes, there is a lot of it around (much on Kindle AU) and much of it is terrible. These are really good.

Part of that is the concept, which differs from many of the bog-standard fantasy RPG settings and avoids many of their pitfalls, but most of it is that Dinniman is a good writer (I think his background is horror shorts) and while he obviously loves games and gaming fiction he doesn’t neglect the story.

Which starts with a bang. Aliens show up and destroy every structure on Earth, and anyone inside them at the time. The few survivors - including Carl, who’d gone outside on a winter’s night in his boxers to retrieve his girlfriend’s pedigree Persian cat from a tree, and Princess Donut, the cat herself - are informed that the Earth is subject to a mining materials claim, and their only chance to regain control of the planet is to make it through an 18 level World Dungeon, created out of everything that’s just been destroyed (it’s unclear yet exactly what materials the aliens wanted, but they are apparently a very small part of the Earth’s total mass).

Obviously there are catches. Each level will collapse after a certain time period, killing anyone who hasn’t found the next stairway, there are boss fights, traps, puzzles, and enemies everywhere, no one has ever made it past level 13 (although from level 10 onwards deals are offered to dungeon crawlers so they can stop trying), and the whole thing is being televised across the galaxy for everyone else’s entertainment; viewers can also sponsor crawlers, and offer gifts that can help or otherwise interfere with their progress. And the AI that runs the dungeon is increasingly unstable…

After the opening it’s a bit slower while Dinniman establishes everything, but it soon picks up again. Princess Donut gets a legendary pet loot box for being the first cat in the dungeon, giving her a massive boost to her stats and the power to talk; she’s a delight of a character, still very much a cat ( her mortal enemies are cocker spaniels), and plays well against Carl, who starts off as a fairly standard “everyman” but has a lot more to him. He’s damaged by an abusive childhood and is accustomed to not depending on others, but he manages to build communities and boost other players (and, as of book 5, he hasn’t had sex with any of the many female characters he’s interacted with, or male for that matter), and as he becomes determined to break the gaming system and get revenge on those running it, there’s a developing tension with regard to what he has to do to accomplish this, and how many people he may have to hurt in the process that I find very compelling. This applies not just to the other crawlers but the NPCs, who are recycled between dungeons with artificial memories for the convenience and entertainment of viewers. And, despite all of this, these are genuinely funny books with some fantastic lines.

There is a lot of death and quite a bit of gore and gruesomeness, including body horror (but no sexual violence). My main criticism is that he does lean heavily on the “I have a plan but I won’t reveal it to the reader YET” - with a small nested flashback when all is revealed to show the set up - but it’s a fairly small objection, and I did like it when on one of these occasions what looked to an exceptionally cunning plan turned out just to be a slightly cunning plan with a bit of luck. The other criticism is that then I read the free samples of about twenty other highly rated LitRPG books and none of them did anything for me.

Book 1 gets the characters though the first two levels, and the subsequent books are one level per book. I don’t know how many books are projected. He also has a back catalogue of other LitRPG books that I am now eyeing up.