Dungeon

Corvin Cray is a deserter. Ten years in the Imperial Legion, one order he wouldn't follow, and now his name is on a warrant and his options have narrowed to approximately one. East of Miren, north off the main road, there is a house at the edge of a forest with a maintained mailbox and a leaflet inside explaining everything. Beneath the house is a dungeon. The dungeon contains treasure enough to make a man invisible to the men looking for him. The dungeon has also never been designed with the adventurer's survival as a primary objective.

Dungeon is a novel adaptation of the 1977 MIT mainframe text adventure, the FORTRAN predecessor to Zork, told through the eyes of a sardonic, methodical ex-soldier working his way through two hundred rooms, twenty categories of treasure, and the slow realization that the dungeon may be more reliable than anything he left behind.

For readers who remember typing GO NORTH and meaning it, every room is familiar. The troll at the bridge. The thief who takes things from fastened pockets without being heard. The grue in the dark. The Flood Control Dam. The volcano gnome. The cyclops. The trophy case with its twenty empty slots and its lock. They are all here, rendered in prose that takes the world of the game seriously as a place a person might actually survive in, if the person is careful and paying attention and not too proud to use a boat.

For readers who have never touched the game, Corvin is enough. A man who needed somewhere warrants don't reach, who found it, and who has to decide what that means.

Dungeon is the story of how the case was filled.