Synopsis:
Enter a world of dungeons and dragons, magic and manticores, goblins and gargoyles in this captivating standalone fantasy from the author of The Gutter Prayer.
Bait doesn’t remember a time before the dungeon. Before the dragon stole her from her cot. She doesn’t know what her name was before she was handed over to the monstrous denizens of the dungeon beneath the sorcerer’s tower. Luckily for Bait, they decided not to eat her. And so, she grew up in the dark – the goblins her adopted family, a vengeful minotaur her protector, a sentient skull her tutor and a faithful blob of corridor slime her main source of nutrition.
But the labyrinthine dungeon, with its haunted halls, buried temples and forgotten magics, draws treasure hunters like moths to flame. And as the outside world starts to intrude, Bait will learn what it means to be monstrous, and she will have to decide where she truly belongs.
Review:
If you’ve ever taken your half-orc paladin (or, insert your preferred race and class here) on a journey through a mysterious dungeon on a D&D campaign, maybe you’ve let your mind wander a little. Maybe as you rolled your dice to see how your bard would fare against a pack of goblins or a gelatinous cube, you thought there was more that your Dungeon Master wasn’t telling you. Perhaps Gareth Hanrahan had some of the same thoughts and went about crafting his stand-alone fantasy novel, The Dungeon Book, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at dungeon politics, cliques, personalities, and the magic running through it all. I had a wonderful time exploring the dungeon alongside Bait, the human child raised inside of the dungeon in Hanrahan’s story.
I read this book very quickly, but even as I was about two-thirds of the way through I asked myself how and why? The more I thought about it, I came up with a description for this novel — Propulsive Lethargy. I felt the book puhing me along, taking me from one aspect of the dungeon to the next or one aspect of Bait’s life to the next, but as we went and traveled the dungeon’s levels, Hanrahan was more than content to let the moments marinate a little along the way. It has elements of cozy fantasy, right alongside the feel of a grimdark or epic fantasy at times. In fact, the closest thing I can probably relate it to is a fairy tale.
The story is narrated by Cornelius the Skull (no spoilers there — it’s printed right on the cover). There is a second-person narration to it at times, but that isn’t made clear until the very end of the book. As Cornelius recounts the life of a young human girl who was brought to the dungeon by a dragon, he does take some artistic liberty in his retelling, which can offer some levity to a sometimes dark (literally — it’s a dungeon!) story. That girl is named Bait by the goblin horde and goes on to impact each and every level of the dungeon in one way or another.
There are some moments where the POV coming only from Cornelius falls a little flat as Bait isn’t in his presence for the eternity of the novel, but Hanrahan has some clever explanations for it.
Now — the title may suggest a book that is just about a D&D campaign or a book full of blood and gore from all the monsters being slaughtered in a dungeon. This isn’t that. In many ways, if I was going to do a comp for this book, it would be Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea, a fairy tale-esque story about a girl who goes on an unplanned adventure to discover her own destiny — not the destiny the world has planned for her.
I very much enjoyed Gareth Hanrahan’s The Dungeon Book, and recommend it, particularly if you enjoy cozy, fairy tale-like fantasy stories, especially if the young girl’s friends just happen to be goblins and minotaurs.
Thank you to Orbit Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Leave a Reply