Discount Dan

Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains, Book 1

De: James Hunter

Narrado por: Steve Campbell

Noclip in, no way out ...

All Dan wants is to find a way home. He'd settle for a beer, a bite to eat, and a place to sleep off his hangover.

But, in an endless, ever-changing dungeon cobbled together from twisted carnivals, abandoned shopping malls, janky laundromats, and condemned insane asylums, getting a bit of shut-eye is harder than it sounds.

Dan has accidentally "Noclipped" into the Backrooms—a bizarro, extra-dimensional Alice-in-Wonderland world, overrun with horrific nightmare creatures known as the Dwellers. No one ever gets out. Hell, forget about leaving, if Dan wants to survive the week, he's going to need to harness the strange game-like magic of the Backrooms, make some very sketchy allies, and carve out a little safe haven to call his own.

And he's going to need to do it fast because Dan is being hunted. The Flayed Monarch of the 999th floor has marked him for death and no one walks away from the Skinless Court with their hide intact ...

“The book is a f***ing delight. I enjoyed the absolute hell out of it and think it's an excellent use of pop culture to make something fun and horrific and awesome.” (Eric Ugland, author of the Good Guys and Bad Guys series)

“Buckle up, buttercup! James Hunter takes you on a balls-to-the-wall adventure that's as insane as it is awesome.” (Jez Cajiao, author of the Arise and Rise of Mankind series)

"Discount Dan is a fun, fast-paced read with awesome game mechanics, surprising humor, and a brutal adventure you won’t want to put down!" (Dakota Krout, author of Completionist Chronicles, Full Murder Hobo, and The Divine Dungeon)

©2024 James A. Hunter (P)2025 Audible, Inc.

DCC fans need to check out DD.

James Hunter has come out with such a fun and awesome new adventure. Discount Dan is cram packed with a ton of nostalgia and epic crazy fun that will leave you wanting more. I feel confident to day that DD is the closest mimic to DCC within the LitRPG genre so far. This book is a solid must buy and I can't wait for book 2.

It's good for a laugh

Don't often review books, I don't write amazingly insightful reviews. This book was good but not amazing, world building and pace were iffy. characters were forgettable but the story wasn't bad and I am interested to see how the story unfolds. The MC has a mess of skills and is completely inconsistent with his military attitude. His sidekicks are meh, not only are they meh they are also inconsistently mentioned scene to scene. I like the theme of this litrpg but the leveling and magic mechanics are loose and vague. Other people around him being so weak is explained once and it just sounded like the author justifying why the people he met could be considered close to his meager strength though they've been in the backrooms for years. Also something that bothers me about a lot of so-so writers is that they don't describe body position and body motions during combat. Therefore in my head while combat is taking place the characters are all standing still the entire fight acting like turrets with occasional movement. I always like this narrator and his accents are very good. He's not great at female voices but nobody is perfect. overall if you've made it through DOTF, primal hunter..randidly ghosthound, beware of chicken, and all of sandersons books. This is a decent time killer.

surprisingly really good

total DCC vibes yet had its own personality to carry its story to a solid book one

A great new twist on LTRPG

At first I wasn't sure how this story was going to turn out. It surprisingly pulled me in. A fun weird tale of an alternate reality.

What a great start…

This book was so fun… Very creative. I love the world building, shop building, and relic forging. I am very excited for the next installment. The author did a great job and narration was great.

I knew I'd like it !

One of my 1st litrpg books was by James Hunter and I can already tell I'm going to love this on just as much.

Solid tale from the backrooms, with caveats

The wonders of the creepypasta/SCPesque backrooms with someone doing a dive through it, setting up an empire, and probably winning after 7-12 books (guessing here). That's the genre and that's what's likely going to happen, the fun is the journey and seeing it unfold. It'll probably be entertaining and good. That said, it's a very narrow stylistic path that the author is walking, and like DCC book 8 you can tell that the author is writing at the edge of their ability to take what they see in their head and communicate it to the reader. It's a worthwhile and fun read, but you have to expect a few things in true Royal Road conversion tradition, thus the caveats:

1. It's unevenly edited, typos, vague scenes, cheap unfaithful narrator tricks, parts that need to be gone over a few times to make it scan, unevenly applied flavor and humor.... The sorts of things that would be hammered out in revision if it wasn't already posted to the internet. For a kooky tale like this that could sort out as the story settles into what its groove is, or it could just natter on in a reasonably disjointed way until either the author or the market gives up on it.

2. It's rather early days for the series, and after finishing the first book you don't really get an idea of the soul of the story or the characters. All the characters besides the main are just kind of there, pale, and only roughed in development wise. Whether that's due to it being early days and the world building muscling everything else out, or just a stylistic choice isn't clear yet. Could go either way, but the author has enough titles under his belt that they can probably be trusted to work that out.

3. It's a bit like DCC, but has the potential to not be. There's enough plot points, story devices and natural similarities sitting in the wings for it to become DCC tours the backrooms, but one could hope that the author shies away from that drive and doesn't just make a forgettable tonal clone.

Beyond that, it's quick enough to be worth a listen or read, and light enough that if after you reading or listening to the first one you can still consider it a pleasant distraction with the chance for more and better to follow.

Not well fleshed out

I decided to call it quits after listening to 6 of the 15.5 hours. There are way too many story holes for me and it is lacking significant interaction between the 2 main characters, Dan and Croc.

When I first started listening I was kind of put off because there are so many obvious similarities to Dungeon Crawler Carl, but I decided there were enough differences that I’d keep going. I particularly liked the whole unusual goofy items thing as clever weapons (or total duds). I can imagine a pez dispenser being used to shoot out candy coated artillery.

One significant reason I stopped is because I was frustrated with the huge holes in the storyline. Dan wakes up after a bachelor party not sure how he got to where he finds himself. He quickly adapts to accepting monsters as the reality and that there is a magic/game-style system. In fact, I don’t really recall Dan questioning it much at all. I actually wonder if Dan is supposed to have come from a world like our earth or if he came from a game-lit world and just didn’t recognize the specific location he woke up in because he had been so drunk the night before.

I also was frustrated with how little information there is on how Croc is supposed to be able to help Dan. The story talked about Dan having to fight with this or that monster, and didn’t mention Croc during these. I envisioned Croc was just sitting on the outside of the fight watching, perhaps like he was a sort of guide dog. Then later there is passing mention about Croc killing off something and I was totally spun for a loop. It unclear how much Croc participates and how much he is just a guide dog.

Another example of how little information there is, is when Dan talks about earning tokens for the fights/kills. He wants to turn them in for prizes. However, Dan never mentions splitting these prizes with Croc. So I took that to indicate Croc is not participating in the fights. But now, when it is finally shared that Croc is actively

I felt frustrated listening to this book and how the storyline focused almost exclusively on what Dan was doing. There wasn’t much dialogue between Dan and Croc. For example they didn’t shout out to each other to coordinate their attack during a fight, they didn’t excitedly share with each other what loot they got. Croc primarily answered Dan’s questions about the game system and the floor they were on. Hence leading me to believe Croc was just a sort of guide dog who stayed out of the way of the players. The story could’ve been so much better if it wasn’t just Dan’s monologue of what he was doing and thinking interspersed with genial comments by Croc.

Perhaps the series better develops these aspects over time, but I’m tapping out.

Great story

This was such a fun listen! I’m ready for book 2! I wonder if Croc and Donut would get along?

Layman’s Crawler Carl

It’s basically skipping the first few floors for Carl and just giving him ways to survive, but it’s good