Book Review: The Dungeon Book by Gareth Hanrahan

 Bagheera was never this much of a prick

  

 

Over the last few months, I have become irritated about the all-encompassing spread of "cozy". Not the genre of cozy fantasy itself, that's been around for decades in one form or another, and I find some of it very enjoyable. But "cozy" as a post-Legends & Lattes marketing trope from publishers and an expansive catch-all term for reviewers, used both positively and pejoritavely. Any book within touching distance, sharing just one element in common with the collection of things that make up cozy fantasy, now risks being forcibly agglomerated into the genre regardless of how well it in fact fits there. Aside from arbitrary personal irritation at the phenomenon, I think it's particularly unhelpful because in categorising everything within earshot as 'cozy', the distinctive and interesting elements of fantasy which is to a greater or lesser extent adjacent to it are lost.

 
The reason I am starting with this digression is because I have seen Gareth Hanrahan's The Dungeon Book repeatedly slapped with the label 'cozy', and in my view categorising it as such does indeed paper over most of what is most interesting about this fine book. 

Rather than being cozy, The Dungeon Book is a story which follows fairy tale logic but is pitched at adults (or at least not at children; one wouldn't be shocked to find this on YA shelf in some bookshops). Our protagonist is Bait, a young girl stolen from a castle and left to die in a wizard's dungeon, complete with goblins, monsters, slimes, and, of course, a dragon. She is raised (sort of), by a tribe of goblins and tutored by the book's narrator, Cornelius, formerly a sorcerer and con-man and currently a talking skull. The plot unfolds with Bait trying to make her place in the dungeon, venturing to explore the outside world, and eventually finding herself tangled in a larger, messier story. The whole setup give the impression of The Jungle Book meets Hans Christian Andersen, or some of the more macabre corners of Roald Dahl (or, for those of you Of A Particular Age from my part of the world, some of Paul Jennings' nastier stories). Yes, like The Jungle Book, it has elements you can read as found family, yes it has quirky humour, but Cornelius is much more of a prick than Bagheera and The Dungeon Book also has widespread, omnidirectional amoral violence and nothing remotely like a cozy ending. It follows the ultimately harsh logic of Andersen's The Red Shoes or Dahl's The Witches, not a cozy "all will be well". In fact, though I'm entirely unsure if Hanrahan had it in mind, a lot of the plot beats (with, you know, added manticores and disembowelments) make me think somewhat of an inversion of Matilda. 

This is a book where spoilers do somewhat matter and, as I'll discuss below, the plot is not the book's finest element in any event, so I don't want to venture too many more details on that comparison, but I'm reasonably convinced I could do a good pinboard-and-red-yarn diagram of the linkages between of the two. I'll just say the The Dungeon Book ends with a departure from the dungeon and an arrival, and it's not a stretch to read that as a departure to adulthood on one hand and a return to the womb on the other. This is a story, in part, about growing up - growing past - the certainties and black and white lines of childhood and grappling with the difficulties of the wide open adult world. But it's also about how a child's home should be a place of safety and nurturing, and that darkness can be that. The epigraph for the book (from a commencement speech given by Ursula K LeGuin) makes that very clear:

And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. [ . . . ] Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

The book's deployment of this fairy tale aesthetic, of stylised childhood - the black and white rules, the brutal consequences, the leaps in narrative logic that in other modes we'd object to - in the context of adult fiction is rhetorically unusual and in my view very effective. It put me in a mental space I don't often inhabit reading fantasy. Part of what put me there, and worth noting specifically, was the gorgeous header images which begun each chapter (drawn by Hanrahan's partner, Edel Ryder-Hanrahan), in the mode of the sketches you see in the classic C S Lewis books, or the illustrations done by Robin Jacques for the classic mid 20th century books of fairy stories by Ruth Manning-Sanders. 

The tonal and plot similarities to fairy tale are also buttressed by the narration. Cornelius is a very active narrator with a vibrant, occasionally (and effectively) comic voice, directed at an almost entirely unnamed "you". This is a story being told, complete with digressions into history which Cornelius has a shaky grasp of and events for which he wasn't present and may well be at least partially making up. This gives the impression of a frame story with nested narratives, but unlike the typical setup for such books, here the frame story is the main event and the nested stories digressions. The effect is to evoke someone relating a legend or fairy story to an audience, without outright pastiche of either than type of story or of oral storytelling.

All of this is put together in truly excellent prose. I've read and enjoyed Hanrahan's work before (which has previously been broadly grimdark-tinged political epic fantasy), but on a sentence level I think this is his best yet. This is true both of imagery - "Slow as grief and remorseless as famine, the dragon uncurled" is hugely evocative - and also of oft-neglected sentence structure and rhythm. The book describes a party of adventurers descending into the dungeon thus, heightening the tension of the basic action extraordinarily:

The heat sapping their strength, breathing an ordeal, panic rising, no way out, no way forward, heartbeats hammering in their ears like drums in the deep, the certain terrible knowledge, no way out, no way out, no way out, daylight a fleeting memory, an impossibility.

Only the Dungeon. Only the dark.

Excellent.

So far, so much undiluted praise. But if you glance to the bottom of the review, you'll see that I've scored this a seven, and given there's so much I like in here, I feel the need to explain why. First, Nerds of A Feather has a pretty firm policy about score inflation, and also doesn't do half points: the combination of those two things means that I don't quite think the book deserves an eight, and can't give it a 7 1/2, which I think it does (but just read the 7 as a 7 1/2). The reason I don't think this fine book quite merits and eight is due to something that is also a strength: Cornelius's meandering narration. The narrative voice is genuinely engaging in the way I discuss above, but it also means the thread of the plot is tangled and sometimes lost, leading action to sometimes feel slow in places and confused in others. That did materially (though not massively) impact my enjoyment of the novel. This is the sort of thing it's easy to look past from a debut author, but for an experienced, professional writer like Hanrahan, I'd ideally have expected just a bit more tightening and just a few darlings killed (which would fit nicely alongside the book's bodycount). That done, the The Dungeon Book would absolutely have tipped over to being truly excellent. As it is, this is still a very good, slightly unusual book (complimentary) with heart, brains, and a well-developed taste for the macabre and rather less for the cozy. More, please.

 

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The Math

Highlights:

• Engaging deployment of the macabre end of fairy tales
• An engaging if meandering narrator
• Brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference: Gareth Hanrahan, The Dungeon Book [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social