I spent years as a story editor at a film production company and before that at a literary agency. My whole job was reading, evaluating structure, character, voice. So when I tell you I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl with a lot of skepticism, you can imagine the bias.
I've never read anything like it. And I want to be honest about its limits, because I notice them, the prose isn't elegant, some of the beats are repetitive, structurally it does things a literary editor would flag immediately. But none of that ends up mattering, and that's what I find genuinely interesting.
What Dinniman pulls off is a kind of momentum and emotional honesty that a lot of "well-written" books I've worked on never came close to. The book has stakes. The characters earn their weight. The gore and the absurdity aren't there for shock, they're load-bearing parts of the world. Donut works because the writing trusts you to feel something for a cat in a tiara without making it precious. That's harder than it looks.
I think it taught me something I should have already known: technical polish and emotional truth are not the same axis, and we tend to overvalue the first one in publishing because it's easier to defend in a meeting.
Curious if other people in the industry, or just careful readers, have had a similar experience with a genre book that broke through their filter. What got past your defenses?