In this very darkly funny adventure (think way amped up Deadpool humor), Carl is saved from annihilation by aliens because his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's prizewinning cat, Princess Donut, has escaped their apartment. While he's freezing outside in the wee hours of the morning, barefoot in his boxer shorts and a jacket, trying to re-capture Princess Donut, Carl sees every physical structure flattened, literally. Anyone who was in those buildings? Gone. He knows that because an alien announcer tells him so. As far as he can see he and Princess Donut are the only ones left alive in the near vicinity. And when he's told that in order to continue to survive, his best option is to enter a stairwell going down to become a contestant in an intergalactic game show? He decides to take that chance. Once in the game he learns that 13 million other humans made it into the game. They may be all that's left of humanity on earth but as the game gets under way? Those millions fall away all too quickly. As Carl and Donut progress through the video-game style contest, they struggle against brutal monsters, other contestants, and ever-changing rules, but they also gain allies and find help in unlikely places.
Though the writing is humorous and Carl and Princess Donut make a dynamic duo in a very fast-paced story, this isn't a happy book. It's brutal, not just in the many ways in which Carl has to kill in order to survive, but in the apocalyptic story itself. What saves it from being just an unhappy slog is Carl and Donut and their determination to save themselves and as many others as they can along the way. Carl never loses sight of the loss of life and he uses his anger at what the aliens are doing to him and all those in the game, humans and others, to persist. And for me, that persistance, against all odds, was a major appeal.
I didn't realize at the beginning that this was the first in a series. I loved this enough to immediately put a hold on book two. Past that point, we'll see.