Book Review: Don’t Die Dave by AR Witham

TL;DR Review: A cranky boomer gets dropped into a Fortnite-esque video game world…and you can imagine how poorly that goes!

A death game where the prize isn’t power or money — it’s health insurance.

+ Insert coin to keep breathing. +

To erase his crippling medical debt, 50-year-old Dave signs a contract that uploads his mind into RiftBorn™ — a brutal pay-to-win death game watched by millions.

Dave doesn’t need to level up or get loot. He has 20 days to win over a generation raised on TikTok and Twitch, or the system pulls the plug on his real-world body.

The problem? He skipped the tutorial and has no idea what he’s doing.

Broke, bald, and armed with nothing but discarded loot and blistering sarcasm, Dave is trapped in a world where every quest is sponsored, every death is monetized, and every mistake goes viral. And for a social hermit like Dave, being watched might be worse than dying.

To survive, Dave must outthink influencers, sabotage engagement systems, and fight back against a healthcare machine that profits if he dies.

Figure out the rules. Survive the game. Don’t die, Dave.

I’m going to say this with my whole chest: Don’t Die Dave is one of the BEST LitRPG books I have read (or listened to) ever.

Read that again: EVER.

Don’t Die Dave introduces us to Dave, a grumpy middle-aged recluse dying of colon cancer who gets a chance to pay off his medical debt by being inducted into a video game world that starts off violent and just gets…well, more violent, but also a whole lot more stupid, too.

The brilliance of this book is that it pokes fun at the worst aspects of gamer culture—not only the ever-changing, often-unintelligible lingo, but the frequent callousness and often mild psychopathic tendencies of players who just go around ganking NPCs for fun. The fact that Dave and his fellow “Living Legends”—aka, real people in real hospital beds—are classified as NPCs rather than players sets the stakes high once people start dropping in droves. Including one BRUTAL kill right in front of Dave’s eyes.

Don’t Die Dave is chock full of both the sort of references a mid-50s teacher would absolutely be dropping (using Frogger as context for understanding the world) while also being stuffed to the gills with the sort of nonsense I used to hear coming from my teenage sons’ mouths as they free-for-all murdered each other in games like Fortnite and CS:GO. It’s not at all subtle in its satire of the modern gamer generation (much like Matt Dinniman’s Operation Bounce House, only way more ridiculous and hilarious) and uses that to set the stage and raise the stakes.

From the beginning, Dave is exactly the kind of grump you’d expect a middle age recluse dying of colon cancer and forced by his evil money-sucking corporate “owners” to play a video game. But I love that over the course of the story, we get to see him soften and reveal his true, good-hearted nature as we’re steadily introduced to more and more characters who win him over.

By the time we’re racing toward what has got to be the single most ludicrous and shockingly hilarious climactic ending, we are fully on board with grumpy Dave and rooting for him to win, if only to put his corporate overlords in their place. If there’s even a tiny part of you that dislikes the greed of modern capitalist society, by the end of this book, you will be raging and swearing.

There is no doubt that the book is endlessly entertaining, with shocking revelations, neck-breaking plot twists, the sort of gut-punching moments I adore, and a story that is both incredibly tight but isn’t afraid to give the characters and the world time to expand.

But it’s the audiobook that really makes this a true EXPERIENCE with a capital E. The author’s narration adds so much color to just the storytelling parts, and he imbues so much flavor and personality into each character, you can’t help but love them. From Pepper the way-too-adorable penguin/heartstring puller/too-bright ray of sunshine to Hank the Tank, the Kevin-Kline-from-Bob’s-Burgers-sounding villain to all the entitled gamers who make Dave’s life a misery, it’s a performance on par with anything out of Soundbooth Theater and other top-tier audiobook productions.

Time and space fail me to tell you all the things I adored about this book, but suffice it to say, I ripped through this one in a matter of days because I just couldn’t stop reading/listening.

Don’t Die Dave is a welcome and much-needed addition to the LitRPG genre, and I for one can’t wait for Book 2 so I can find out what comes next. If you want top-notch LitRPG that isn’t afraid to get silly and have fun, but which still tells one hell of a story, this is the book for you!

A grumpy old recluse, dying of cancer is dropped into Fortnite, and you can imagine how well that goes