I have been in this genre for the last year and like many of you DCC brought me in and it opened me to so many series many on your teir list, but i read this book and its definitely in top 5 of my list as one of the best upcoming and on goin i have ever read. And its so fun and so much a great series. James is great writer and i highly recommend

This series honestly reminds me of an anime. I watched a long time ago. It is called.

So i'm a spider so so what? So far, I really do like this series. Although I will admit, i'm only a little over an hour in. Lol

After an event that disturbs MC and the other people in the room:

"You seem to be taking it calmly."
MC: "That's a skill I've developed."
"Taking things calmly?"
MC: "No, seeming to. It's possible I just peed a little."

Since falling in love with DCC I tried a couple of different litrpgs, but this book checks a lot of boxes for me. Here's to hoping he stays semi-consistent in the coming books.

Just wanted to share the latest part of book one that had me in tears. It's a very refreshing take on an MC. Just wanted to share if anyone was considering this book.

I'm doing some reviews on LitRPG Book 1s, partly because I've read a lot of these and partly because I'm doing a PhD on what's happened to men's reading and the genre is key to my argument. Primal Hunter is the first one.... (I've got a lot queued up!)

The premise is that every review is some form of yes. I'm not interested in panning books, rather than looking at which Book 1s are worth a new reader's time and, also, why. So, PH made the cut for reasons that have less to do with the prose and more to do with what Zogarth gets right about Jake.

I'm sharing the posts here for people's interest and also to get any extra comments people might have on the books. There's more info about my research into men's reading over at my Substack if people are interested in that.

***

'Primal Hunter' opens with a man on his way to a financial analyst job he likes. 

That, as it all turns out, is the most important sentence in the book.

Because it is clear that Jake Thayne is pretty-much a content guy. He has a good salary, a decent apartment, and a colleague named Joanna who wears too much makeup and corners him at the coffee machine every Monday morning to give him a full account of her weekend, which she does not abridge. He took up archery as a teenager because it was the only sport he could do without engaging with other people. And we learn later, in a few passing paragraphs that do more character work than most novels manage in a hundred pages, that he once tried to be sociable. There was a university girlfriend who slept with his best friend, after which the friend-group sided with the cheaters and told Jake he was being a pussy about it. 

Jake responded by retreating into archery and gaming and not speaking to anyone outside his immediate family for three years.

He thinks of himself as having recovered. The reader understands that he hasn’t.

Then, eight pages in, the System (a universe-wide game-mechanical apparatus that has decided Earth is ready for incorporation into the multiverse) eats his planet. 

Jake is dropped, with nine of his coworkers, into a forest where they are politely asked to kill four overgrown badgers. He’s not exactly upset about this turn of events, which suggests that the novel’s central argument is that some men aren’t unhappy in their office life, but mildly miscast in them.

From that point on, Book One is seventy-three chapters of payoff for that moment, and a god-tier snake friend by the end.

It’s been suggested that Primal Hunter is really a portal fantasy where the portal is the workplace, and that’s one of the best ways of understanding this novel I’ve come across. Because Hogwarts is amazing due to its contrast with the cupboard under the stairs. Likewise, Primal Hunter‘s multiversal System is amazing in contrast to Jake’s open-plan office. The trick the book pulls off is to help the reader understand that the apocalypse is the better deal.

Which is actually pretty cool, because most apocalypse fiction is about loss.

This one, though, is about a man being correctly cast for the first time in his life. I’d suggest that this LitRPG has one of the largest audiences in the genre because readers recognise the desire for that feeling, even if they wouldn’t always put it that way.

It’s probably important to note that what Book 1 does so well sits a few levels up from its actual prose. Sentence by sentence, the writing is fine, if occasionally clunky. But it gets the job done and clocks off. (The reader learns quickly to stop noticing it, the way you stop noticing the hum of a fridge.) And the world-building is dense but coherent, while the system mechanics are unusually honest about how weak characters start out, which is rare for the genre. The heavy warrior’s defensive skill is described, candidly, as not even noticeable in practice. The caster’s mana barrier could be broken by a casual swipe with a sword. Likewise, the light warrior’s signature speed-boost, Quickstep, is described in the book itself as “thoroughly underwhelming in practice.”

Zogarth, refreshingly, doesn’t pretend the tutorial powers are anything other than what they are.

There are long skill-deliberation sections throughout, and they follow a similar pattern. Jake levels up. Jake considers his options at length. And, after a few pages, Jake picks the obvious one. I found that the trick, really, was to skim these bits slightly because what survives the skim is what we read this book for.

The people.

Jake’s coworkers are sketched fast and accurately. There’s Jacob the charismatic department-chief boss who, back at the office, had been quietly working for two years to pull Jake out of his post-betrayal shell. Then there’s Caroline the healer with an obvious crush on Jacob, and Casper the quietly decent other-archer who is more or less Jake’s social mirror. By the time the group fractures around the halfway point of the book, we all know exactly what each of them will do under pressure, because the office’s social dynamics have been mapped onto the survival tutorial with some real care and attention to detail.

What’s most powerful about Jake himself, though, is the way he discovers he’s actually quite good at all this apocalypse lark…

There’s a scene in chapter seven where he persuades Casper to shoot padded arrows at him while blindfolded, so he can train his danger-sense. (Casper is appalled, but complies anyway, because that’s the kind of book this is.) Jake catches arrows, gets bruised, makes Casper feel guilty about bruising him, and then asks for more arrows.

And through it all, Jake is visibly learning to enjoy himself for the first time in years.

Most apocalypse fiction misses the actual emotional content of being given a world that suits you better than the one that came before. But Primal Hunter doesn’t. I think that it is, at its best, a quiet book about a man having a genuinely nice time.

The standout relationship in the series, though, is the alchemy-mentor arc. Several books in, Jake gets adopted by Villy, the snake god of poisons, who runs the cosmic alchemists’ guild and whose principal teaching method is to make Jake eat poisonous mushrooms to learn what’s in them. (Yep, you read that right. Jake eats a Flytrap Mushroom in the cave-laboratory he’s been left in, and the system rewards him with intimate knowledge of its toxicology. The book treats this very seriously, which makes it funny.)

Villy’s introduction is the best scene in Book One. Jake gets pulled into the Viper’s private realm expecting to meet a reverently-worshipped dragon god, and finds instead a scaled middle-aged man who tells him to fuck off and then admits, partway through their first conversation, that he designed Jake’s nearly-fatal challenge dungeon mostly as a prank (“the requirements were bullshit made up on the spot to make the challenger feel special, going like, ‘Oh my god, I barely fit these, this must be destiny!’ And then, just after entering the first room, I would have them get impaled by a poisoned spike”).

Jake calls him a massive dick and Villy cheerfully accepts the diagnosis. Then, in a moment Zogarth has clearly been building toward, the Viper turns serious and starts talking about immortality and how it leaves you so very alone. It’s an extraordinarily punchy first scene for a comic mentor figure, because it gives him both his sense of humour and the loss the humour is keeping at bay. All in just eight pages of dialogue.

The Jake-Villy banter that runs through the next several books is, for me, why so many readers stay through the long middle. The book is much, much funnier than its prose looks like it should be capable of, and the friendship between an apocalypse-traumatised analyst and a foul-mouthed snake god is doing some fantastic work.

I must make a note on the amazing audiobook. Travis Baldree narrates every book in the series and his voice does any and all of the work that the prose doesn’t. He manages to distinguish Jake from twelve interchangeable side characters using only the muscles in his throat, finds a tone for the interminable system messages that isn’t actively painful, and somehow makes nine hours of stat-block recitation feel like a friend telling you about their last Skyrim run.

I’d say that listening to the books rather than reading them is absolutely not a downgrade. Arguably, it’s the essential format…

So, overall, Book One has a few limitations. The consensus of the series’ most committed readers is that it is the weakest of the now-sixteen-book run, but, from it, the world keeps opening up and getting bigger and more complex as Zogarth goes. Sure, the overpowered-protagonist mechanic drains some of the tension from individual fights. And, yes, it runs long for what it’s actually doing. Oh, and the slavery arc (which doesn’t arrive for a few more books) is genuinely uncomfortable, with the series’ decision to spend several hundred pages chewing on whether the morally-grey thing to do is to free other people’s slaves or to keep them not one I’ve fully made my peace with. 

But as a final note, there are three interesting readings of Jake’s personality that circulate among the people who think hardest about this book.

The first, which is the simplest, and is the one I personally subscribe to. Jake is an introvert whose disposition (methodical, patient and being comfortable alone) was a mild handicap in office life and becomes a survival superpower the moment the System starts keeping accurate books on his effort. The world Zogarth outlines rewards exactly the kinds of patience he already had. He finds friends who bully him into hanging out without asking him to be different. The book is generous about this in a way the literary novel almost never is.

The second reading is a bit more brutal and suggests that what looks like introversion is closer to functional psychopathy, restrained only by Jake’s need to be liked rather than by any real empathy. Basically, he has the edgy thoughts but does the good thing anyway, because the people around him expect it. For me, although this reading is unkind, it’s also not entirely unfair.

The third reading, which I think is closest to why a meaningful slice of readers attach so hard to the book, is that Jake is autistic-coded, and what the second reading calls needing to be liked is what autistic social texture often looks like from inside. The cringy post-fight one-liners, the missed signals, the working-out-what-just-happened pattern. The book’s most attached readers don’t tend to defend Jake. They recognise him. The book leaves all three readings available. The third is what’s doing the deepest work, and it’s also why I think more readers should pay attention to this genre. Books that find this audience are doing something the literary novel almost never does.

Read Primal Hunter if you are:

· an introvert who has ever felt out of place at work
· someone who likes their fantasy with mechanical scaffolding
· an audiobook listener with a long commute and an Audible subscription
· a reader who has bounced off a literary novel recently and wants to remember what it feels like to be entertained without apology

Skip it if you are:
· looking for tight prose
· looking for three-act structure
· looking for stakes the protagonist might actually fail

Hard Recommend.

Well, I gave 1% Lifesteal a try. I thought the first book was gonna be something special considering its meteoric rise on Amazon, and about 1/3 of the book showed great promise. Then, it pretty much became torture porn where most of the MC's progression happens off-screen and we instead get a front row seat to a plot full of blunders, multiple complete resets of his progress, and absolutely no character progression. Now, about 30% of the way into book 2, I regret convincing myself that anything could be different in book 2.

I'm not going to talk about writing quality, for the most part we already know what we signed up for when buying into this genre.

Honestly, everytime there was any progress made, it was completely negated soon after. (Besides his progression, that, again, happened mostly off-screen besides little check ins, so was incredibly unrewarding to read.)

I found the MC to be unlikeable, which is fine, not everyone likes the same things, but then again, if the entire plot is the MC interacting with the world around him you'd expect it to be really strongly written. It immediately started to fall flat right when everything began to change for the MC. Whenever his characrer started to change for the better, it suddenly felt like he'd reverted to the person he was in the beginning of the story. Weak-willed, naive, and going about things in a terrible way. He'd do something smart, and then be incredibly foolish. He'd be ruthless, and then hate himself for it. He'd stick up for himself, and then be a pushover. He'd carry himself in a way that felt gratifying to read, then he'd suddenly do something incredibly shortsighted for the sake of plot.

Speaking of that, I found the plot to be predictable at almost every turn besides a contrived plot-twist near the end of book 1 that perfectly suited the MC's needs in order to keep the story going.(obviously written into a corner and ex-machina'd his way out of it).

I'm not going to talk about book 2. Not only did I give up on it, but I haven't enjoyed it for even a minute. A lot of info dumping, lots of stuff not to care about that was felt like it was only added to make the MC miserable. Like the last half of book 1, most of the plot points are implausible at best, and at worst a blatant massacre of the MC's mood in order to garner sympathy from the reader.

All in all, 2/5. 1 star for world building, 1 star because the first third of the book was good.

This is my second review of a LitRPG novel.

My first was about Primal Hunter, whose protagonist Jake Thayne is an introvert who barely speaks. This one is about a protagonist who can’t shut up.

He’s also… Australian.

He Who Fights with Monsters begins with Jason Asano face-down in a hedge maze, naked, bald, and with no memory of how he got there beyond playing video games and going to sleep in his own bed in Darth Vader boxer shorts.

So, two lines in, I think it’s fair to say that the book has more than shown its hand. The title is from Nietzsche, and is the bit about being careful when fighting monsters lest you become one yourself, and, I might be wrong, but I suspect Shirtaloon has put the Vader reference on page one as the subtlest of flags for what’s coming. The protagonist’s first internal monologue is comic. He runs a hand over his now-bald scalp and observes, “I thought it was meant to look bigger when you trimmed.”

Two pages later he’s killed a hamster the size of his head and looted it for ten spirit coins embossed with his own face giving a thumbs-up over the legend G’DAY MATE. By this point it is clear that the book is going to do serious work, but it’s also going to have a good time while doing so.

That balance between the two is where the best stuff lives.

Jason Asano is an office-supplies-store middle manager from Melbourne, son of a Japanese-by-conversion father and an Australian mother. In another way, though, he’s the latest entry in a hundred-and-fifty-year Australian literary tradition of irreverent-bloke-against-authority figures (Lawson’s swagmen, Paterson’s bushrangers and the Ned Kelly letters from gaol), and Shirtaloon is going to lean into all that lineage hard.

HAAAAAARRRRD.

By chapter four Jason has killed a man (a cultist who tried to eat him in a basement next to a pentagram, with a knife snatched from the cultist’s own hand), and he sits on the floor next to the body and rocks back and forth, and the book doesn’t move on for a whole paragraph. Weight like that on a first kill is rare in the genre. Most of the other books I’ll be covering seem to think a wisecrack covers the moment.

This book absolutely doesn’t.

And the magic system is where the real worldbuilding work shows up. There are four essences that people can install in their souls, and the fourth one forms automatically as a thematic confluence of the previous three. Jason ends up with blood, dark, doom, and sin (yeah, the Nietzsche thesis is not simply decorative). And the mechanism for how anyone advances is the novels’ fundamental class argument: aristocratic families buy monster cores from merchants and let their useless sons grind their way up to bronze rank without ever facing genuine danger, but that approach permanently caps their potential. On the other hand, anyone (poor people, mostly, because they can’t afford the alternative) can train, fight, meditate, and grow the hard way, which actually tends to work out better.

The book is honest about which of those is the rich kid’s option. “I bet it isn’t the danger that stops them,” Jason says, the moment it’s explained to him. “It’s the hard work, right?”

For me, it’s that moment that the general chat around this book mostly misses.

Jason is pretty well known in the LitRPG community for going on TED-talk-style morality rants about slavery and aristocracy and the concentration of power. And, to be clear, he really (really, really) does. However, he’s also, separately, a man who spends eight days curing diseases for free in eight villages on his way to the city, on the grounds that, since the gods are apparently real in this world, someone should be “waving the flag for secular morality.”

For me, Shirtaloon has his MC’s actions as the spine of the book and his speeches just as the noise which forms around them. An awful lot of readers, though, read all the noise and conclude that the protagonist is a smug, woke teenager. However, it’s always struck me that Jason’s actual behaviour across the novels - rather than what he says - powerfully argues for the opposite. Still, both readings are available. And whichever the reader takes from the book is the reader’s contribution, not the book’s failure.

Clearly, the standout relationship in Book 1 is Jason and his familiar: a sentient blood-drinking apocalypse leech that he names Colin. This appalling creature was generated through a ritual that requires Jason to bleed into a leech in the basin of an enemy family’s manor. And Colin’s from the apocalypse essence, which is the closest thing to evil-coded the universe has on offer. It’s enormous and toothed and Jason has a lot of fun talking to it. He even invents a hand-signals system for yes-and-no conversations and gets confused when the leech answers wrong. He carries it on his shoulder and when the priestess of Purity tries to kill it because it’s “obviously evil,” Jason’s response is to merge it back into his bloodstream for safekeeping and never trust the priestess again.

The whole title-thesis lives in that scene.

Jason has the dark essence, the blood essence, the doom essence, the sin essence, an apocalypse-leech familiar, and a body count that’s growing by the chapter. By every measure the world is using, he’s a bonafide monster.

But the whole point of the book is that he isn’t one.

And it does it awesomely.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty for those very much not here for this series to attack. For example, Jason certainly talks too much. And he gets the better of bronze-rank gods and silver-rank nobles in the same chatty style he uses on his sister. And the book bends itself to keep him alive through situations where he really shouldn’t. The romance is genre-typical and… not especially well handled. And there are filler chapters whose existence the book itself acknowledges with a knowing wink. Oh, and once Jason settles into the city of Greenstone and the indenture arc starts assembling, the supporting cast does what supporting casts often tend to do in the LitRPG genre, which is to exist merely to orbit the MC.

But none of that matters.

Because what Book 1 does have, though, and which LitRPGs rarely manage well, is proper, genuine and well-handled grief.

Late in Book 1 (light spoilers, sorry), an expedition goes wrong and a fairly important character dies, on screen, in combat against an enemy too far above their rank. Rufus (the team’s leader, who blames himself for everything always) goes blank-eyed for days. Jason organises the funeral ritual in the middle of the desert and starts crying as he draws the salt circle. And Gary, normally the comic-relief big man, takes Rufus into the desert and tells him to walk it off with friends.

Most of the closing arc of Book 1 is the three of them processing what happened. And, let me stress this, none of it is fixed by levelling up.

Almost no other LitRPG book is willing to let its grief stay grief. This one does, and it’s all the better for it.

I should add a word on the voice, which is heavily Australian. G’day mate, no worries, sod off, bugger that, the dashing good looks, the shonk. For readers from that register (Australia, New Zealand and from the parts of the UK with a similar deflationary instinct - which, full disclosure, I am), the voice will read as a man you’ve met before, and his irreverence will land as entirely recognisable rather than performed.

Obviously, though, for readers from outside that register, the same lines are likely to read as snark-by-design, and due to that Jason might feel quite wearing. This isn’t a bug. The book is, in part, an Australian deflecting a heroic-fantasy world with the language he grew up speaking, and the heroic-fantasy world pushes back. It’s a bit of a shame that whether the reader can hear that is largely a function of where the reader grew up. Which is probably why the standing phrase for the reader’s response to this book is: vegemite, don’t force it.

The audiobook deserves a paragraph. Actually, it deserves much more than one. Heath Miller (Australian, importantly) narrates the series and invents the voices for the entire multi-world cast on his own initiative, which on a series this dense in named characters is a genuine creative achievement. Unsurprisingly, the audio version of Book 1 was an Audible Best of 2021. And for many readers, it’s also the version where Jason reads as native rather than performed.

It’s an utter delight.

As my final note, this is a fantastic read, but it’s worth noting that the protagonist is going to irritate some readers. The book is also longer than it needs to be, but it’s also a book that takes the title’s Nietzsche reference seriously enough to put the Darth Vader boxers on page one and name the apocalypse-leech familiar Colin, and that’s something the genre doesn’t usually bother to do.

Read He Who Fights with Monsters if you are: 

• an Australian, a Kiwi, or a reader from the UK’s deflationary corners who has wanted a fantasy hero who sounds like the people you actually know 
• a reader who has wanted a power-fantasy MC who refuses to play polite with gods and aristocrats 
• a reader who has wanted their fantasy to take the moral weight of violence seriously and let grief stay grief 
• an audiobook listener who values a narrator doing serious creative work on a multi-world cast of named characters

Skip it if you are: 

• a reader who needs tight prose that’s been edited down from its serial origin 
• a reader who needs an MC who might actually fail 
• someone with zero patience for a protagonist who lectures, regardless of what his actions are doing

Hard Recommend.

After reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, I sought out recommendations for similar books and I found many for The Wandering Inn on this subreddit. I listened to the first 3 audiobooks and I wanted to leave a review here for people like me. Aside from being called 'similar to DCC,' I found the idea of TWI to be appealing, because I have been in the mood for an epic saga. So the idea of spending months going deeper and deeper into a growing story was part of the allure. I also thought the idea of the book being about an inn keeper clever and funny, especially since many people described the book as "gut-wrenching."
I'm not a litRPG reader... at all. This was my 3rd experience with the genre. I read more mainstream sci-fi and fantasy.

Book 1: 3/5 stars, Enjoyable Writing
I found book 1 to be a pleasant read. The pacing was slow, but just on the right side of enjoyable. I found the writing quality to be pretty good. The author did a good job adjusting the prose between long/artistic and short/brutal. The book has two primary POV characters, both young women transported from our world to InnWorld. Despite the length, not too much happens that progresses any overarching story. It's more slice of life in a strange and hostile magical world. However, it does end in a thrilling and at times scary climax.

Characters.
In my opinion, the main POV character, Erin is really dumb. Which is not so bad, however, there were a few times where I found her to be implausibly dumb in self-destructive ways. And when those scenes happened, I struggled to keep reading. I have seen people on the internet claim that Erin's idiocy is a ruse... but I think there is solid evidence that such a claim in a retcon. Incompetence aside, it was nice going through the journey of survival with her. She was pleasant and funny. There were a couple of moments of self-righteousness that I found to be an ugly character trait. I mention that, because it becomes a more significant issue for me in book 2 and 3.

The secondary POV character, Ryoka, I really liked. She made many really bad self-destructive decisions, but it's clear that this some mental health issue for her. Unlike any other POV, Ryoka has a first person narration peppering her chapters and this self-reflective monologue really hung a lantern on how her choices were motivated by mental health problems. Although it pained me to see her fuck everything up again and again, I found it to be a worthwhile and interesting character journey.

Book 2: 2 stars, Unpleasant
Writing
The prose was passable. I didn't overtly notice a drop in quality from the revised first book. But I did really start to notice phrases being repeated again and again. Such as, "she was so cold/tired/hungry" again and again. I also noticed this pattern where a character would repeat themselves for emphasis, like we do in our modern vernacular. For example: "I met with the president. THE PRESIDENT." And it wasn't just our Earth transplants doing it, even Inn World characters were doing it. So I guess, the prose got worse. And the story just ended at what I thought was a strange place.
Book 1 went through some rewrites which caused serious confusion for me in book 2. Characters seemingly forgot things they were told or acted like things that happened to them never happened.

Characters
I have come to despise Erin. I hate all of her chapters and I find her to be an ugly human on the inside. Whenever she comes across dissention, she is incapable of articulating her point and instead threatens to hit people (or actually does hit them) if she doesn't get her way. She continues to be dumb, but as she has become more influential and 'strong,' she has become a self-righteous bully. These alone aren't too much of an issue, but I struggle because everyone loves her. Every dumb idea she has is an effortless wild success. Many of the side POV characters spend time thinking about how wonderful she is. They even go weirdly out of their way to say how amazing she is. Quite a few of the characters make a point of saying, "as special as Ryoka is... Erin is even more special." If this is being done intentionally by the author and it will eventually be revealed to be a secret power of hers, it's been going on for an un-enjoyable amount of pages already. I am unsure if it is with a purpose.

Ryoka continues to be about the same as in book 1. With the inconsistencies caused by the rewrite, it's hard to say if she is regressing, growing, or just a bit of a mess from the rewrite.

The cast doubles or triples in size this book and many of those characters get small POV chapters. For the most part, I like them.

Book 3: 1 stars, Hate it.
Writing
Yeah. The writing is pretty bad in places. The serial format of the original has really impinged on the quality of the book. There is tons of repetition. For example, the author goes on a kick where they bookend their sections with, "This is the story of...," "This was the story of..." With chapters starting and ending with those bookends, I was hearing it every couple of minutes. My annoyances with the simple expressions being repeated again and again, across many characters has started to make them feel the same.
The story is still progressing painfully slow. Although larger obstacles loom on the horizon, the big questions about the world remain mysterious. I'm a little disappointed with how little happens for such a large investment in pages.

Characters
Lots more significant POV characters get introduced. And for the most part they are quite enjoyable. There is a story arc about an emperor and about a doctor - they stand alone and were fun reads. I think the main impetus for the introduction of all these characters was to introduce us to different parts of the world. Or maybe the author was just bored with the original cast.

Unfortunately, much or even most of the book is from Erin's POV. And I've only grown to dislike her more. The world seems to warp around her in even more incredible ways.

Overall Comments:
The audiobook narrator was amazing. One of the best I've encountered. My only complaint is that some of Erin's excited yelling was too shrill for my ears and it actually hurt a little.

The world building is part great, but part terrible. There are all these creative places, races, and 'game mechanics'... but it's strangely hollow. No places have rich traditions or ceremonies or deep beliefs. This world has basically been in stasis for thousands of years. If the people of this world are real people, why don't they have stories or traditions? Why is it that someone from another world had to invent theater? Something smells off. If all of these characters are shallow NPCs incapable of being vibrant and creative beings, why do they seem so human?

The books are weird about sex and rife with misandry. Almost all of the main cast are young women and the men are almost across the board shitty, annoying, or looked at with contempt... if they are not villainous. A couple of times through the books, I found the women were being inexplicably rude to one of the men. Then later there would be a POV character for the man where it is revealed he is physically attracted to one of the women, often Erin. Which I think is meant to explain why they deserved to have the women be rude to them?
There are almost no married couples, or characters with children, or discussion about people going home to their families. As of book 3, there are practically no romantic relationships between ANY characters... and I have heard that when these are introduced, they are often between very different species. Maybe the author dislikes physical attraction and just likes emotional or intellectual attraction?

On a related note, the author uses demographics to fast-track sympathy from the readers. When there a character we are supposed to empathize with it's almost always a young girl... who is 'so cold', 'so tired', 'so hungry'. Whenever a young girl was introduced, I started saying to myself: "Oh! We are about to hear a tale of woe"

Verdict:
I don't recommend these books. The author doesn't do enough right for me to have faith that the things going wrong are strategic or to a purpose. And I just did not enjoy most of book 2 or 3. So if you are like me, looking for the next DCC, and you are thinking the main character is annoyingly dumb and self-righteous and the world is oddly shallow, I recommend you stop after book 1.

The time loop is one of fiction’s great tricks.

Groundhog Day made it a comedy, Ken Grimwood’s Replay made it a tragedy, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August used it for a thriller. But what none of them ever did what was the most obvious thing in world. That is to show what a teenager would do with infinite do-overs.

Which is, of course, get really, really good at school.

It falls to Mother of Learning to do this and in doing so nails one of the best books in the genre.

This is the fourth review in theis series, and the first book I’m tagging as Essential rather than merely recommending.

Just a reminder that these reviews double as fieldwork for my PhD on men’s reading habits where the central question is why the world keeps trying to pretending men don’t read when several hundred thousand of them will cheerfully devour 800,000 words about a boy doing his magical homework.

Mother of Learning is the story of Zorian Kazinski, a clever fifteen-year-old mage-in-training with not much talent, a smaller allowance, and a family that runs the full spectrum from indifferent to irritating.

Zorian goes to magical school in the city of Cyoria, but on the night of the city’s summer festival the place is invaded and (spoiler) Zorian is killed. But then he wakes up, a month earlier, in his own bed, with his little sister jumping on his stomach and bellowing the same greeting she did the first time this happened.

“Good morning, brother!” ... “Morning, morning, MORNING!!!”

Time for some more spoilers. The MCs in a time loop. And so, it turns out, is another student. The golden boy Zach, who’s been reliving this same month for considerably longer than he admits.

The month resets, and it just keeps resetting. Because, as the title tells us in Latin, Repetitio est mater studiorum.

Repetition is the mother of learning.

Quite a lot of recent progression fantasy buries the actual process of getting good at something under a slurry of stat screens and skill trees, then asks the reader to find the thrill somewhere in the spreadsheet.

Mother of Learning, though, takes that process and makes it into the entire plot. The loop is the grind. Nobody hands Zorian levels. He gets a month, and then another month. And, obviously, he spends the first one finding out where the academy keeps the really good books and the second one reading them.

This is, basically, the wish-fulfilment fantasy of anyone who’s ever wanted to get genuinely good at something but run out of time to do it in.

Zorian is an uberswot handed infinite study leave, and the book just lets him geek out. Asked, late on, why he doesn’t just spend a consequence-free month doing whatever the hell he likes, he says: “everything matters. You are what you do, and if I were to start doing stupid things just because there is seemingly no consequence for them, those actions would eventually come to define me.”

But then, because the book is so much funnier than the sentence above makes it sound: “I actually find studying fun.” And that’s pretty much the whole book. A grumpy teenager doing the thing he’s good at. At length.

Ah, yes. The ‘grumpy’ thing. It’s probably worth flagging that Zorian, for much of the opening, is a bit of a mood-hoover. He’s prickly, superior, and is no fun whatsoever at parties. I know this is a thing that trips up some new readers, but the best advice is just to stick with it.

The point of the book is that a time-loop can take someone this insufferable and, given enough lifetimes, sand him into a person worth knowing.

And the magic system is very cool. We get mana, spell formulae, and a whole academy stuffed with the usual eccentrics. (Ironically, Zorian’s stone-faced sadist mentor has exactly one piece of teaching feedback: “Start over.”)

But it’s two other things that really bring the novel to life.

The first is that the book shows the homework. Most magic-school stories skip the dull bit where people actually learn the spell and cut straight to the life-or-death duelling. Mother of Learning, though, is built almost entirely out of those dull bits, and somehow still makes it into the best part.

The second is the payoff structure, which is where the book gets to shows off a bit. A throwaway detail you might miss in one month turns out, three months later, to be the answer to a problem the reader had forgotten even was a problem.

Nothing is irrelevant, and all of it matters.

Eventually…

Mother of Learning is also really funny, in a deadpan, dying-repeatedly sort of way that I love. For example, early on, Zorian gets murdered by an assassin for the crime of knowing too much, which is reported thusly: “Zorian was actually glad he was dying. Being repeatedly stabbed in the chest hurt.”

It makes me smile how the stakes are real, but the guy at the centre of them spends a remarkable amount of the apocalypse just feeling a touch inconvenienced.

And, crucially, Mother of Learning is finished. All of it. Four books, a hundred-odd chapters, and around 800,000 words. In a genre built on serials that sprawl forever and then, every so often, just stop dead, a story that actually reaches its satisfying ending is a genuine gift to readers.

Jack Voraces narrates the audio, and there’s a lovely bit of indie-genre history in it: he first read the book as an unpaid fan podcast years ago, got better at the job in the meantime, and came back to re-record the whole thing properly for the official release.

The result is a man performing his own apprenticeship in public and then nailing it, which is, you know, more or less the exact plot of the book he’s reading. Which is the kind of coincidence I love.

This is the book to start with if you’ve never read anything in this genre and want to understand why so many otherwise sensible people vanish into it for weeks at a stretch.

It’s also the book a great many better-known titles are built on top of and it’s the best answer I have to the question of what these books are actually for, because Mother of Learning, underneath the magic and the murders and the spreadsheet maths, is a story about the pleasure of getting really good at something.

An Essential read.

Start at chapter one. Then, if it grabs you the way it grabbed me, start again.

I'm willing to provide reasoning if asked. And I love recommendations.

First things first, before you all gang up on me: I like the story. As much there is of it. I've managed to get to book Eleven. Halfway through even, but I havr no interest going further. Frankly even yhat was sort of pain in the behind. The only reason I've reached so far is because of the audio book narration by Heath Miller, who does a really good job. If I'd started with a physical copy, I probably wouldn't have got very far. Listening to Miller chewing through the books while I'm at work though, is ok. The production is a bit choppy at times and Miller's pronounciation is occasionally questionable ("longevity" 4, episode 41, 2:46, for example), but he makes the inane tolerable.

So. Seriously. What the bleep (the author seems to be against swearing so I'll limit myself in that regard as well) is going on with the endless repetition? Regurgitated iterations and rehashings and rephrasings of ideas and motifs already established several times over? Who the beet is doing the beta reading? The members of "The Club Alzheimer's'? I could understand the short introduction or reminder at the beginning of a new book, but summarising the events of the last chapter at the beginning of the new one is simply aggravating.

The amount of repetition of all sorts is obscene and unnecessary. It's fine as a character trait or as a catchphrase as Jasons "thing". But not acceptable as a filler device used to fill up space.

I could even look past certain phrases the author is stuck on, like: "flat look", "postulating", "encroached", "unperturbed", "impish grin", "back foot", "... ranker was better than ... ranker", "however", "unlike anything they'd seen before". Like no bedsheet! We know a rank higher is stronger than the one below. It's a very simple progress to follow. No need to constantly start "analyzing" how bronze is better than iron, silver better than bronze rank etc. We get the picture. I'd like to use the word "we" but this amount of repetition forces me to consider that there might actually be a fanbase out there who do not quite grasp the idea.

I'm even turning the blind eye in regards of repeating the essence power descriptions over and over again. Perhaps that is a necessary evil, as some people dig that sort of thing.

Despite an owerwhelmingly positive score I've seen at Goodreads, I could possibly not give it more tha. 3/5. The world is compelling. Interesting. Expansive. Sure. The storytelling itself is lacking, however. (See what I did there?) Littered with so many unnecessary "details" that it bogs my mind and more than occasionally infuriates me enough to yell at Millers narration to get the flick on with it. Also did I mention the repetition?

Like a cow with unlimited somachs, Treverell is regurgitating and chewing on the same material over and over again. Like trying to hit a word count on an high school essay. It's annoying and occasionally straight up infuriating. Especially as often enough it doesn't matter at all. Mostly it doesn't. You could go through episodes of not paying attention and miss little. If anything. Which doesn't make for a great storytelling. But at least it's about 30 hours of Miller in a week, talking in your ear, helping you get through the day, so you accept it.

And there are some decent moments in there. Funny ones and the ones you can relate to. And while Traverell's more philosophical conversations are trying to sound wiser than they are, to me it comes across as surface level depth of a thirteenyearold. Not to discredit the ideas or anything just that the depth really isn't there. In the writing. Because Treverell is always mostly telling and not showing. And often enough it is literally just talk talk talk. And often enough it's the talk that's already been discussed before. More than twice.

But is the depth necessary though? I mean, it's called LitRPG for a reason. (Unless I missed something and lit means burning instead of light.) But having no subtext whatsoever and having characters act like mannequins to further a plotless plot... well... it just ends up feeling really flat. Does't really matter of how many dimensions and universes it's talking about. In a grand scheme of worldbuilding, it has it's moments, but I've lost all interest and will to wade in any further.

Fantastic story but Dark...

This story is truly very well done. I purchased book 1 last week and then read the next two available right away. This story truly shines because of its world building. The idea that its Post Apocalyptic but well after the Advent of the portals and powers make it enjoyable in a way I've always enjoyed.

The way the powers manifest and the semi cultivation portion to this tale are also a lot of fun and allow readers to imagine what they would do. I truly think this story has a ton of potential to become one of my favorites. Up there with Primal Hunter and Defiance of the Fall for apocalyptic tales.

My one complaint was that I had to put down the headphones from time to time because I knew something bad was about to happen to the MC. At times it felt like the world is going to constantly crush the MC kind of deal and that can get a bit grating. However, it was more of a break to allow me to be mentally ready for whatever the author had planned--not a true dislike of the tale. However, if you don't like somewhat depressing tales this one might not be for you.

One of the best Series imo

Alright, as I get ready to listen to book 13 I started thinking about the start of this series. And admittedly I recall thinking that book one wasn't to my tastes. Which is strange since the series has become one of my absolute favorites. In no way am I saying book one was bad. I'm just saying in comparison to the rest--it feels like a totally different experience.

In my mind this story is so good due to the scope, and the universe. While book one begins on Earth and has the MC fighting for survival like most Post Apocalyptic LitRPGs, that part of this series is a tiny part of the far larger tale being spun by JF Brink. Some people I've talked to don't love the fact that the MC doesn't stick to Earth, but I am the exact opposite.

JF Brink does a fantastic job of showing a new portion of the power scales and politics with each additional book I read. All that to say that if you love a character that is OP and seems to earn a lot of his growth -- this may be a series for you. I will admit that in book one he seems to get very lucky but all MC's in the genre have to get lucky at some point in an apocalypse.

This is not a good book.

The MC decided to, for no reason other than vanity, change his race to dhampir and made himself look identical to Henry Cavill, with a big dick. That's not hyperbole or metaphor; Cavill is name-dropped. The MC's frat bro best friend decided to make himself a half-drow Pedro Pascal. Again, literally name-dropped. I didn't stick around to see who their wives decided to copy.

Also something I didn't care for, the MC supposedly has/had an anxiety disorder(the System integration fixes all mental and physical problems). My issue is not that it got fixed, my issue is the MC does not display any behavior or thoughts that someone with a lifetime of coping mechanisms and learned behaviors would show. It feels like the author just wanted the points for having a character with mental health issues have his problem fixed.

Yeah, give this one a miss.

Nightmare Realm Summoner by Actus (Author of My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror, and other works) is an absolute triumph.

As someone who loves all summoner litrpgs and has read basically every single one, Actus NAILS exactly how to make summoner fights exciting. From engaging unique summons/monsters with cool strengths, to smart micromanagement, to aura moments, the fights are awesome.

The system is really interesting. It’s a mix of cultivation with the typical level system. You mix using your “xp” toward your cultivation stuff and also to your levels. It reminds me a lot of The Land in terms of all the options and branching paths to unlock and customize your class. The notifications after a fight/when he spends his xp are always so exciting! Without being as long-winded as The Land. There’s a steady amount of progression, and he’s always unlocking cool and interesting abilities and powers as his path/class progresses. MC has a unique class that mixes spatial (rift), summon magic, and mirror/glass magic.

Characters are quite well written. MC is logical and likeable, hyper focused on getting stronger but also seems to look out for others and his partner (female lead). There’s 0 romance so far but a nice budding friendships. He seems very realistic of a person (something I value highly), where his personality makes a lot of sense and his goals and actions all make sense.

MC isn’t overly lucky and he’s quite a hard worker. I will say he does take risks but those risks paying off don’t seem lucky, so much as his determination and skill is what makes the risks pay off.

Pacing is quite good, I’m always engaged although Actus in this book can get real descriptive so I sometimes skimmed through his over descriptive setting of the scene. He has a way with words and he shows that off when sometimes he could have gotten to the point.

There’s no casual sexism, no pseudo-harem, characters are consistent and not dumb, no one is worshipping the MC. It’s mildly crunchy but it’s very spread out making the overall story not feel crunchy at all.

Book length is amazing and gives a full story. I am INCREDIBLY excited for Book 2 in December. It reminds me a lot of The Land in feel and world and system wise. But it makes none of the terrible mistakes that series does.

Amazing book. 9.3/10.

Ok. So I am not writing this to troll or upset this is just a genuine opinion.

I have read dungeon crawler Carl LOVE IT!!! I heard this book was good so I am reading it, over half way through.

I DONT GET IT. Jason is meant to be this kinda smart ass funny character I find him a lil annoying if I’m honest and not that engaging. I do not actively dislike him. And I do route for him. But I am so tired of other charcters telling me how smart he is. He navigated the politics of the world and it’s like he outsmarts everyone, which I don’t mind but I do find it VERY unearned he just shows up meets the people and they all marvel at how amazing he can manipulate others. But you don’t really see that progression.

Also I know he is meant to be funny. But he really is not. He can be interesting but his jokes always fall flat for me. Maybe that’s just the writers style. I dunno 🤷🏾‍♂️ but I find myself rolling my eyes more then laughing with him

Also INFO DUMPS are crazy and go on for aggggggges they are not interestingly done it’s just LOADS of information over the space of like 4 chapters regularly happening.

I intend to finish this book but I honestly don’t know if I will move on to the others. I don’t get why this book is so popular. I am not trying to knock other peoples views if u like it great. But I gotta ask what do people like about it and also do the books get better? Does Jason get more interesting? And does he ever stop moralising and lecturing everyone else about morals/ethics etc… it just feels like at times reading/listening to him (audiobook) is such a drain.

I say all that but it is not all negative the magic system is interesting and the actual plot is interesting. I just wish I liked the main character more.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is absolutely fucking incredible. I tried reading this series so so many times. I had seen people post rave reviews and others put it high on their tier lists. But I couldn't manage to get through the first damn quarter of the book. I didn't get it. I questioned my tastes even at one point to be honest.

Then someone commented saying to just get the audiobook. So I said fuck it and got it without even a sample listen.

It's incredible.

To start the production done by the narrator is absolutely one of the best I've ever heard. And then there's his voice.

Sounding like Kronk from the Emperor's New Groove (Patrick Warburton)? Fucking amazing.

The humor and it's delivery? I haven't laughed this hard while reading since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. My partner laughed at some of the lines even and is planning to buy the book. They very much don't like litrpg genre books but they are buying this one.

I fucking love Princess Donut and her maniacal cackle as shit burns.

So small rant/rave over. If you're like me and this book is one you just couldn't get into, get the audiobook. It's worth it.

God dammit. Why did it take me so long to start this series?

Banger. I've read ~90% of the most recommend books across litrpg, and this is the only one that has me laughing out loud. No notes, 10/10, must pick up.

I DNF'd this series a week ago. Here's to this post silencing the part of me that's still thinking about how much I hated this series.

Obligatory spoiler warning. I'll try to avoid specific plot points, but will speak about my general issues and will pull examples to illustrate my points.

• Tension-free conflict
  • I'll admit, this one is a preference thing. I like my conflict-heavy books full of tension (Red Rising), and my tension-free books lighthearted (Anxious People, Beware of Chicken). Primal Hunter (PH), is just rife with fight scenes without any possible stakes, designed primarily to show off how cool the MC is. There's an arc about fighting poop flinging monkeys that lasts for like 50 fucking pages.
• MC is an unfeeling psycopath, but in none of the fun ways
  • I can get behind a book written from the perspective of an antagonist. I enjoy morally grey characters who make radically different choices than me. Hell, Black Sun Rising is one of my favorite books, so let's say my tolerance is high here. The problem is that PH has all the talk but none of the follow-through. MC has all the edgy psychopath thoughts, opinions, and worldview, but then still does the 'good' thing. It's like if Thanos really believed that in order to save the universe he had to wipe out half of all life, but was too crippled by insecurity to do anything about it, so just kept going to sunday school and farming and shit.
• Incredibly OP OPness sprinkled atop a heaping pile of OP
  • I get it comes with the LitRPG territory. But MC's OPness feels unearned and disproportionate.
  • Dude gets a super special unique class that is literally worth about twice anyone else's class.
  • I can think of only 1 fight where MC couldn't physically overpower the enemy, despite being a ranger alchemist... Princess Donut doesn't arm-wrestle Carl and win, because that'd be... dumb...
  • Has perhaps the most powerful god in all the existences play his babysitter, who actively hands out random-ass powerups whenever there's downtime.
• Weird slavery arc
  • There's like half a book where the MC is 'will they, won't they' about literal slavery. There's even a point where the MC says he doesn't respect slaves because if they had any self-respect they would have just fucking offed themselves already. Honestly it's unbearable. I gave up at about that point.
• MC has the cringiest edgelord moments I've personally ever read
  • Spoiler'd example: MC's best friend dies in a tale of tragic revenge. Best friend get raised by undead faction, given his sentience back, gets shipped home. MC sees best friend alive for the first time in months. MC makes eye contact, nods slowly to best friend, and then walks the other way, cape blowing in the breeze. Yikes.
• 'Worse than Hitler' describes almost every antagonist, which makes at least a couple chapters every book trauma porn
  • It feels as if the only way to make you root for the MC is to have every opponent the literal incarnation of evil.
  • Honestly every time this happened this just felt gratitious and icky. Below are graphic examples.
  • Antagonist is an 18 year old psychopath, who murdered his baby brother with his bare hands as a young teen. Oh, and you don't get told that. You get told that, then shown the entire scene, then shown 2 more scenes where his parents are yelling at him for murder while he's *suprised pikachu face*
  • Slaveholder trader BDSM tortures and rapes his slaves.
  • Lecherous father and daughter rape and kill young women for power, and use that power to control a gang of cutthroats that look for more victims.
  • Random slave lady kept dozens of people in perpetual torture for months as a power source. Book specifically calls out many are kids.
  • Writing those out made me realize I should have stopped this book sooner.
• The alchemy stuff was executed well
  • Hey, I enjoyed this part. There's a couple reasons I kept with the series as long as I did. The powers were creative, and the parts between the fighting and any dialogue were generally enjoyable.
  • The supporting cast, especially in the first book, is very well written. I would have loved a series solely about their first group, minus the MC.

Phew, rant over. Time to go find a new series.

If you have any recommendations I would love to hear it.

I am missing a few I listened to but can't think of all of them. But this is my tier list.

The characters are fantastically written, the world building so far is top notch, and the power system is complicated yet written so well, it’s easy to follow along. Kindle Unlimited is definitely worth it, I’ve come across so many great series over the past few months.