M F ALFREY

The Dungeoneers by Jeffery Russel – A Review

I was looking for a fun dungeon crawling experience in a fantasy setting with clever little nuances that would make it stand out, but also something comforting and familiar and I reckon I found it with The Dungeoneers. I Google searched “dungeon adventure novels for adults” and this book came up under the category of “Classic D&D-inspired adventures” and the little blurb about a professional team of dungeon-delving dwarves hooked me. The other thing that specifically drew to this book was the fact that The Dungeoneers was self-published and, being an indie author myself, I’m always looking for other well-told indie stories, a category of which The Dungeoneers fits. Top line – I really enjoyed this book, and despite moving country at the time of reading, I finished all 332 pages relatively quickly.

The Dungeoneers is an easy, fun read following a group of highly professional dungeon delvers who clear dungeons for royalty and rich folk who don’t want powerful relics falling into the hands of some fated farm boy or milkmaid. The numerous dwarf characters are fun and pleasantly smack of Tolkien’s dwarves in The Hobbit but perhaps are a little more cavalier and with a more pervasive sense of humour. They set off to, you guessed it, retrieve a powerful relic before it falls into the wrong hands, yet what seems like a simple run-of-the-mill delve and clear becomes more of a death-defying adventure than they were expecting, especially the confused protagonist Durham, the guard of the sheep gate.

Russel manages to thread an amusing tale with a few surprises and a pleasantly timed pace which kept me reading without needing to look ahead. I popped on a bit of dwarven fantasy music while reading and felt totally immersed and amused. Putting the book down afterwards I felt I could read another one of those tales, so it is a good job there are other books in the series, and I do believe they are all standalone and don’t need to be read in any particular order.

To sum up, The Dungeoneers is what I would call a cosy, low-stakes adventure with humorous charm. Just what I was looking for at the time.

Enjoy fantasy myth and legend?

Try The Sixth Dawn, a collection of interwoven short stories by yours truly.