finished reading

I was not prepared for this book.  It is absolutely bonkers and bananas.  I am not a gamer, so I was not familiar with some of the lingo.  This is basically a dystopian role-playing game.  I got it because I have read so much praise for the audio narration — which was well-deserved, indeed. So, Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, are forced to team up to survive a deadly intergalactic reality game show after aliens destroy Earth and turn it into a multi-level dungeon.  The book is the experience of Carl and Donut as they navigate the levels, figure out who to trust, who to get advice from, and work with other contestants.  It's brutal, violent, and very funny.  I laughed out loud several times.  I have yet to decide if I'm up for more of the series (although part of me is curious as to the fate of Carl and Donut).

From the publisher:

The apocalypse will be televised!

A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth - from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds - collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over.

In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game - with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.