Blog Assignment: Sam Lipsyte's :The Dungeon Master Critique

Yeah, so maybe you're all getting sick of this Eladrin picture from the instruction manual- maybe I'm sick of making good fan-art.


As a former Eladrin Wild Sorceress, I was immediately drawn to Sam Lipsyte's The Dungeon Master.
The short story was published in the Oct. 4/ 2010 addition of the New Yorker. Lipsyte is an American short story writer and the author of four novels to date, his latest being
The Ask.

Link to the Short Story

Thankfully, unlike the sadistic overlord Dragon Master in the story,  I had DnD Danny as a Dragon Master who allowed me to cast range spells at a jillion kobold tokens while hiding in a large pile of gold.
By the by Danny: I still say that regardless of being able to equip armor I should be able to set fire to the gold pile, roll and in searing gold, heal myself and come out with gold permanently welded to my skin as...The Ultimate Armor!

Anyway, I can never be sure how accurate the characterization was, because I don't know what level of impersonality is used when high school boys interact with each other. They were so generally uninterested with each other, that aside from Marco and the Dragon Master (for whom it still took a few reads of the first paragraph to sort out) I was continually confusing the characters.
You would think that each character having an of their inner selves right off the bat would provide instantaneous deep insights into their personality but it does surprisingly little for the story. The thief kid is a rogue. Big surprise.


Death was clearly a theme, with frequent mention of the Dungeons and Dragons suicides, Cherninsky not wanting to die in the game, and the Death of his sister. I thought it was very powerful towards the end, when all the faces of death leaking in the story, eventually swirl together.
Dungeons and Dragons before World of Warcraft, and eventually Second Life, was the ultimate false life. The whole story to me is really about the delicate balance of life and death, DnD as a pseudo life, postponing the imminent death of those who had nothing to live for. Eventually, death as a force, which permeates each of the players lives, begins to chip away at their delicate defenses  and as the fragments of the game fall away, death glints through the cracks.

My verdict? Read it. It's sufficiently dark enough to carry the themes without being forcefully dramatic. It's paced nicely, and although its not suspenseful, it draws you to read to the end. Once you get there, despite the web (or lack thereof) of loose ends and lack of closure, you find that it was worth the 10 minutes you spent, better than 10 minutes of watching whatever is on Family Channel while flipping through the real channels, looking for something decent.

Keep up the good dungeoneering readers!