6/10 overall. My rating for the first book was 9, and my rating for the seventh was 3. So it goes.
The series is ongoing – I think there are about 3 books left.
the good
Fun. Hits all the good progression fantasy buttons – character solving puzzles, hacking his game, getting stronger until he’s one of the biggest players around. My mood on a 10 point scale was like 2 points higher than baseline in the week I chewed through the first three books.
I especially loved the metagame: being coerced to go on talk shows; being coerced to go sign things at a con right before a big battle (and getting game-relevant information from attendees), getting pulled into meetings with your lawyer about the lawsuit ongoing about the trick you used to survive last time, which has financial & political consequences for the powerful galactic factions who sponsor & run & fight in the game
This series made me think: I’ve had bad luck with recs for ‘good books’ due to divergent ideas of what is good. But I bet people’s ideas of addictive books are pretty convergent, and I’ll have a better time if I specify ‘addictive’ over ‘good’ when getting book recommendations.
I also liked the characterization, which is interesting, because it’s like 1% of the story. The narrator is a big guy with big blind spots – he’s not thinking about personal stuff the vast majority of the time, and when he does, it punches you with the fact that this guy is actually pretty weird, had a weird life, and had a super dysfunctional relationship with his ex whose cat is now sentient and fighting alongside him in the dungeon crawl. There’s one page in book 3 or 4 where he mentions his girlfriend did an insane relationship thing (spoiler in last paragraph of this section) not once but like 10 times, and it suddenly makes you understand something about that relationship and what she wanted from him and what neuroses she had.
But does he understand? No. And it’s delicious.
The biggest story promise of this series, to me, is that he and his girlfriend will meet up later and actually hash out their frames now that they’ve gotten way more information about each other (he from her now-talking cat, she – presumably – from the reality TV show he’s on), and I’m pretty sad I will likely never read it (because by the time it comes out I’ll have forgotten too much about the series and will be unwilling to reread).
The insane relationship thing: she told him she was pregnant (in order to get commitment signals from him)
the bad
Sorry, my brain is too small to understand the complicated train tracks and schedules in the dungeon 3.
Eventually the character’s backstory – both the childhood and the relationship one – becomes a little too tortured and dramatic. It would be better, I think, to lower the intensity but deepen what’s already there, instead of just adding more bad things.
The cat is annoying. She’s complicated, which helps, but she’s more annoying than she is complicated.
I have a major philosophical objection to (an implicit moral claim I think is being made by) the series – okay, this is kind of an anticapitalist book, but against a strawman of capitalism.
It’s a battle royale story taking place in a world where there’s a massive popular appetite to see torture and death, the existence of this appetite is the main moral evil of the story, and the author tends to pretend this is also a huge problem in our world so that their work can stand as a Commentary On Real Evil.
When the world, Dinniman’s actual readership lives in has the opposite problem – too squeamish about seeing torture and death and coercion and collectively agrees to sequester it out of view so that nice things can keep being available for under five dollars at the grocery store. (Reading Pachirat’s book on slaughterhouses immediately after this series crystallized this nicely for me.)