A bearded man in a red bathrobe and a paper crown stands in a store aisle in front of the glass checkout counter, a brown bottle in his hand, with a blue rubber dog in a red cap and collar sitting at his side, while a tall junk golem with a mop stands in the next aisle behind them.
Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains, open for business: the shopkeeper, his best friend, and Baby Hands on the mop.

James Hunter · three books, 2025–2026 · an illustrated series walk

Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains

A hungover contractor wakes in the Backrooms in a knock-off bathrobe, befriends a mimic doing his best impression of a dog, and opens a discount store in hell.

An unofficial reader’s companion

Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains is James Hunter’s LitRPG horror-comedy, three books so far: and in 2025, in 2026. It is set in the Backrooms, the internet’s endless maze of yellow wallpaper and humming lights, rebuilt as a jumble of numbered floors under a game system with a mean sense of humour. Its hero and narrator is Dan Woodridge, a Cincinnati contractor and ex-Marine who wakes there hungover in a knock-off bathrobe and decides that the way to survive hell is to open a store in it.

This is an unofficial reader’s companion: each book summarized movement by movement and walked in frames painted in the manner of a 1950s horror comic, with the cast, the reading order and how the three books join up. It spoils everything, endings included.

No film or television series has adapted the books, so in place of screen pages walks Hunter’s Backrooms and sets the books beside the internet legend they borrow from.

1

A Store in Hell

Dan Woodridge is thirty-six, a general contractor from Cincinnati who spent eight years in the Marines driving trucks. After a bachelor party he comes to on short gray carpet under flickering lights in the Lobby, the yellow-wallpapered ground floor of the Backrooms, dressed in whatever drunk Dan picked: a red-and-gold baroque bathrobe, very short jorts, unlaced work boots and his tool belt. A floating yellow window signed by the Researcher informs him that he has been Noclipped, and that his odds of survival are vanishingly slim.

Hunter’s Backrooms is a jumble of numbered floors (not a neat stack, Croc insists) reaching down to the God Box on the thousandth, each floor running one theme into the ground: a parking garage, an ‘80s mall, a haunted hotel, a suburb, a snow globe. Its monsters are Dwellers and its lost humans Delvers. A System called the VIRUS runs the place like a game, with levels, stats, loot and sarcastic achievements, and power comes as Relics, cut from the monsters you kill. A dead Delver’s Relics keep their levels, so people hunt people too.

Within twenty minutes Dan has blundered into a duel between a gunslinger and the Flayed Monarch, ruler of the 999th floor, and when he comes to, hours later, what fell out of the monster’s chest is waiting under the rubble: a compass that is a whole class of utility magic, down to the power to carve a piece of the Backrooms off as his own. The Monarch’s Skinless Court marks him for death. Dan’s answer is a contractor’s, and his father’s one good business lesson: if enough people have the same problem and you can fix it, you have a business. He will build a store and a refuge, with doors on nearly every floor. “Teamwork and a splash of capitalism.”

His first friend down here is Croc, a mimic passing himself off as a dog made of glossy blue clog-rubber, who grows a pair of googly eyes because Dan asks him to. Croc is sweet, anxious, devoted to Twilight and perfectly happy to eat anyone who threatens his friend; cast out by his own kind as defective, he has spent decades trying to keep newcomers alive. His first rule could stand for the series:

“everything, everywhere, all the time is both lying to you and trying to murder you.”

A bearded man in a red bathrobe winds up with a claw hammer held high in both hands before a towering four-armed red monster with a tentacle cloak and a centipede’s body, in a yellow-wallpapered office room.

1 Marked for Death Twenty minutes into the Backrooms, having already bought a wounded gunslinger seconds to heal, Dan hurls his claw hammer at the Flayed Monarch’s mask (book I, chapter 3). The demon crushes him under its will; the gunslinger runs it through from behind, and both vanish in a flash. The battered compass that tumbled out of its chest is left for Dan, and with it a mark: every Aspirant of the Skinless Court will now try to kill him on sight.

2

I · Discount Dan (2025)

The first book takes Dan from level 0 to 22 in about a month. A Monolith shaped like an old ATM wires him into the VIRUS, the compass wakes, and he picks a target from the Researcher’s job board: a Blighted MediocreMart on the mall floor, run by the Harmacist, a plague-doctor store manager with a revolver that fires syringes. Dan beats it with a riot shield cut from photo-booth plexiglass and a trap he marked earlier, casts the compass’s Mythic power over the building, and cuts 14,200 square feet out of floor 3 into a pocket of the Backrooms that is his. With a nod to the flea market of his boyhood, he names it Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains.

Customers follow rings of red yarn he hangs across the Lobby. Taylor, a college student from Oklahoma, is the first; the first who can pay is Jakob, a horned, white-scaled Cendral who was human once. On floor 7, the School Zone, Dan and Croc throw themselves at five of the Monarch’s Aspirants to save Temperance, a Salem exile in a pink bunny suit with a meat cleaver, and Jakob, who has been shadowing them, arrives to finish it. Dan kills a person for the first time. The System awards him a title, Cold-Blooded Murderer, and he feels sick.

To win Temperance her way back into Howlers Hold, the four of them clear Funtime Frank’s Jungle Gym Jamboree, a Blighted fun zone the size of a city, all neon games and booby-trapped play tubes, whose boss is a giant gorilla with a band of taxidermy-and-machinery horrors. Dan kills him by summoning a 1972 Pinto inside his mouth. Back at the store Baby Hands is mopping and Princess Ponypuff is squealing like a goat, and Dan, who woke a month ago wanting only to go home, finds that has changed:

“Now I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to leave.”

He climbs onto the checkout counter, tells the frightened Delvers in his aisles that they are a community, and raises a beer. The book’s price is his first kill and a price on his head; its prize is a crew.

A bearded man in a red bathrobe crouches in a neon-lit 1980s mall face to face with a blue rubber dog that has just grown big googly eyes, an old gray cash machine behind them.

2 A Normal Human Dog In a neon ‘80s mall on the third floor, Dan asks the eyeless rubber dog who has been guiding him to grow some eyes, since it is hard to tell what he is thinking, and Croc happily obliges with an oversized pair of plastic googly eyes (book I, chapter 11). Croc is a mimic who has watched north of three hundred newcomers die; Dan, he says, is the first who ever listened. The friendship is the series’ heart.

A bearded man in a red bathrobe with a hammer, a blue rubber dog, a horned man with white scales and a woman in a pink bunny suit with a cleaver stand at the edge of a neon carnival with a striped big top and a Ferris wheel.

3 Into the Jamboree Dan, Croc, Jakob and Temperance step onto the sticky purple carpet of Funtime Frank’s Jungle Gym Jamboree, a Blighted fun zone the size of a city near Howlers Hold (book I, chapter 45). Some of its slides hide saw blades and its boss waits in the big top. Clearing it is Temperance’s way back into the Hold and the first job for the crew the series follows to the end, and Croc’s chief grief is that someone has ruined the slides.

3

II · Cul-de-sac Carnage (2025)

The second book widens the map. Frank’s prize, a Kiosk Franchise Opportunity, lets Dan kill a giant hermit crab wearing a mall kiosk for a shell and join a franchise network run from the 99th floor. Howlers Hold, a safe harbor on floor 7 founded by 317 people, most of them furries, who noclipped together from a 1998 convention party, offers an alliance if Dan can carry its three-person Tribunal: Wraith, the security chief whose bull mask hides a real bull’s head; Ajax, the fox-suited quartermaster, who wants his laundry done; and Jackson, Wraith’s brother, who wants Dan handed to the highest bidder. So Dan, Jakob and Croc fetch a sacred laundromat out of Hotel Hell, the fifth floor, from a cult of tiny bearded Laundry Brownies; a third golem, Camo Joe, takes over security; and Jackson, trying to bully Dan into a discount, is frozen by the store and banished by its Ban Hammer.

Then the Director, a woman in a Shakespearean gown who serves a power she will not name, tells Dan that his compass cut the Monarch’s own doors, so the Skinless Court now moves its armies through the kiosk network of the Franchisor of the 99th floor. Kill him, she says; and if they do, Dan works out, three thousand kiosks become his. Croc is afraid of going deeper and of losing Dan; Dan tells him friendship isn’t a transaction, and the four of them vote to go down.

The first stop is the 24th floor, Eternal Suburbia: a subdivision called Sunnyside where the dads mow in unison, the children ride in silent packs and hunt the grown-ups after dark, and a broadcast illusion keeps every lawn in order. There Dan finds Ed Myrl, a Vietnam veteran who has held out against the signal for decades with his parrot, Woodstock, and learns that the radio station is the Homeowners Association itself, a kaiju patched together from the neighbourhood’s houses. Dan meets it in a twenty-foot mech built from his own reanimated Horrors and an ice cream truck, while Jakob and Temperance, trapped inside the monster, arm Myrl’s bomb.

It costs most of his army: the mech burns out the Relics in his Horrors and in five of his door guardians, and they stay down until he rebuilds them. Dan reaches level 42, and decides that the HOA’s illusion engine, which could bend every mind on a floor, is power no one should hold, himself included. The book ends with Twilight on the DVD player and Croc’s head on his thigh: for one night Dan is “just a guy, drinking a beer, watching a terrible movie with his best friend”.

A bearded man in a red bathrobe and a paper crown kneels beside a blue rubber dog inside a dome of golden bars of light on a night-time suburban street, while a monster built from houses, with one huge eye and a radio mast on its head, looms behind under a huge red moon.

4 The Homeowners Association The Sunnyside radio station rears up as the Homeowners Association itself, a kaiju patched together from the neighbourhood’s houses with the signal tower for a crown (book II, chapter 49). Thrown clear with Croc, Dan raises his golden Pog shield on the street and pours a healing Zima into the dog, whose legs are broken, while Jakob and Temperance are still inside the monster with Myrl’s bomb. What follows is the book’s finale: an ice cream truck, a swarm of exploding clones, and a mech.

4

III · Kiosk Kingdom (2026)

The third book, the longest by some way, is the road down to the Franchisor, one themed floor at a time, with the store as base camp between them. Hunting a lost Howler raiding party through an endless airport on floor 4, Dan cuts Harper out of a mimic’s cocoon: a former pediatric nurse with dragonfly wings, who joins the team as its healer. Ed Myrl stays behind on floor 24 to help the Howlers settle the suburb.

Floor 49 is a cursed snow globe. Its gingerbread-walled Viking settlement, Kringlegard, is ruled by Nikoli, a huge Russian smith who wants Dan to kill the Krampus squatting in his forge. Dan loses his left hand to a Hag’s frostbite, gives up the memory of his childhood dog’s last day to make Croc a collar whose tag reads “Dan’s Best Friend”, and kills Krampus. Then he finds the Jarl’s Soul Forge worked by enslaved Delvers, some of them children, and is offered a partnership. For one second he is tempted:

“And all it would cost me was all the human decency I had left.”

He refuses, Nikoli drowns in his own steam-powered armour, and the captives go home.

Floor 75, a white research wing of the Variant Research Division, shows what the Backrooms is for. Croc and Jakob have long called the place a ship; here Dan learns that humans are its specimens and the floors rebuilt habitats, and that the Blight is a plague brought aboard by an alien hive. A laboratory machine grows Dan a new hand and heals Jakob’s arm, but a recording of the Researcher himself, a tentacled being with one lidless eye, says the ship is moored on Earth and no Delver or Dweller may leave until it is purged. No one is coming for them; there is no way home.

Floor 99 is the 10,000 Acre Wood, where a sun-faded Winnie-the-Pooh has spent decades looking for Christopher Robin, and beyond it the castle of Steamboat Studios. The Franchisor, Oz the Terrible, turns out to be James Graham, a Korean War captain who noclipped into the wood, let the lonely bear call him Christopher, and, to keep the bear safe, traded himself away one piece at a time. When the Franchisor’s hydra, a winged serpent with Steamboat Willie’s cartoon head, nearly kills them, Croc throws himself in front of its beam, the bear stands between Croc and the next one, and Oz turns his flying monkeys on it. Dying, he asks Dan to end it, and Dan does. The System rewards the mercy, and the whole Kiosk Network becomes a subsidiary of Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains. The book ends with Dan taking a rain check on a date with Harper to keep a promise to Croc: Froyo, and the arcade slides.

A blue rubber sleigh with googly eyes and a pointed red cap flies over a pine forest strung with Christmas lights under a glass dome, carrying a horned man and a woman in a pink bunny suit, while a bearded man in a red bathrobe and a paper crown floats beside it with one arm stretched toward it and a woman with dragonfly wings flies close by.

5 Over the Snow Globe Below the fireworks tent of floor 24 lies a giant snow globe, and Croc, who has just grown a gnome’s pointed red cap, turns himself into a sleigh (book III, chapter 15). Dan tows it through the air by telekinesis with Jakob and a reluctant, height-fearing Temperance roped aboard, while Harper, the team’s new healer, flies alongside on her own wings. The aurora overhead is not weather: it is a Dweller, and it is hunting them.

A bearded man in a red bathrobe and paper crown walks through a forest of giant trees, a claw hammer raised in one fist, beside a blue rubber dog in a red cap and collar with a battered old teddy bear riding on its back.

6 The 10,000 Acre Wood For five days in the 10,000 Acre Wood of floor 99, a sun-faded Winnie-the-Pooh rides high on Croc’s back and guides the team toward Steamboat Studios (book III, chapter 48). He has been looking for Christopher Robin for decades, his memory fraying at the edges, but he knows every trap in the wood. At the castle he will find the man he once called Christopher, and stand between Croc and death.

5

The Shop Must Grow

The store is the spine of the series, and the measure of Dan. In book I it is 14,200 square feet of dead drugstore with two junk golems and a free kit and a free night for every newcomer; by the end, a hot-dog stand and ten doors. Book II adds a hotel suite, a laundromat with its own religion, a security chief and doors into Howlers Hold; its Grand Reopening brings 123 Howlers through those doors, and the Hold’s children ride Croc like a pony. Book III adds an airport lounge and spa, a dozen more rooms from Hotel Hell, a bar and grill in an old Loot Arcade tended by a four-armed golem with a television for a head, a job board that pays bounties on the Monarch’s Aspirants, the Jarl’s forge, a door to Kringlegard and, last, the whole Kiosk Network, some three thousand kiosks down to the 355th floor. The third book’s blurb puts it in four words: “The shop must grow.”

Dan grows with it, though not in a straight line. The man who wanted only to go home ends book I calling the lost in his aisles a community. In book II he drops the murderer’s title, powerful as it is, because he does not want to become what it rewards, and he turns down the HOA’s power over minds. Book III tests him harder. He equips that title again to hunt the Monarch’s Aspirants for double experience, over Jakob’s protest; he refuses the slaver’s partnership; and in Oz he meets a man who began with good intentions and traded himself away one piece at a time, and he can picture himself in that mask a year from now. The book’s answer is mercy, and a night on the slides with his best friend.

The store is a refuge in a place built to study people, and it is also, more and more, an army’s base and a franchise empire. The books know it, and joke about it, and Dan has to keep deciding what the store is for.

In a discount store crowded with people in furry animal costumes, a child in a fox costume rides a blue rubber dog with googly eyes, while a bearded man in a red bathrobe stands at the checkout beside a toy-built robot with a pink pony’s head.

7 Grand Reopening Doors in Howlers Hold bring 123 Howlers to the store’s Grand Reopening, over a third of the Hold, most of them in fursuits (book II, chapter 21). They queue two dozen deep for the laundry, binge at the concession stand and buy every Artifact on hand, while the Hold’s children ride Croc like a pony. Behind the register Dan helps Princess Ponypuff, who hates customers and never haggles. The shop is becoming a town square.

6

What Kind of Book It Is

A LitRPG first: a novel that runs on a game’s rules, with stat sheets, loot, crafting and level-ups on the page, and a System whose achievement messages heckle Dan at every turn and hand out titles such as Cold-Blooded Murderer and Toddler Terminator. It is also a horror-comedy. The floors are full of things that want to eat you, the books are gory and profane, and Dan, a combat veteran who hates clowns and whose one true fear is furries, narrates it all in the first person as a running joke with a body count.

Much of the joke is pop culture. Hunter’s monsters are nightmare versions of what a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s grew up on: a Pac-Man that eats people, a Donkey Kong gorilla with a band, a homeowners association as a final boss, a Santa who keeps slaves, Krampus, and a lost Winnie-the-Pooh beside a hydra with Steamboat Willie’s head. Pogs raise shields, Zima heals and Jolt Cola restores Mana. Under the jokes the series takes friendship seriously, and readers’ reviews keep coming back to Croc.

Readers reach for one comparison above all: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, another LitRPG of a hero in absurd clothes, a talking-animal companion and a heckling System. Some call Discount Dan a clone, others say it grows into its own story, and one Goodreads reviewer of book II summed up the likeness: “Carl had a cat, Dan has a dog.” The ratings climb book by book, from 4.12 on Goodreads for the first to 4.42 and 4.54 (seen 27 October 2026); the praise goes to Croc, the friendship and the game mechanics, the complaints to crude humour and long lists of loot.

A bearded man in a red bathrobe, a hammer raised in his fist, and a blue rubber dog run down a neon arcade aisle, chased by a huge yellow sphere with angry black eyes and a mouth full of fangs, a little ghost in a pink sheet fleeing beside them.

8 The Mobile Murder Muncher In a Loot Arcade on the mall floor, a sedan-sized yellow sphere with shark eyes and anglerfish teeth comes rolling down the aisles chanting “WAKA-WAKA-WAKA”, and Dan, who knows a nightmare Pac-Man when he sees one, runs (book I, chapter 18). He escapes only by kicking one of its ghostly prey into its jaws. It is the series’ comedy in a picture: the games of an ‘80s and ‘90s childhood, grown teeth.

Cast

The cast across three books

Dan Woodridge

narrator · I–III
Thirty-six, a Cincinnati general contractor and former Marine truck driver who noclips into the Backrooms after a bachelor party in a knock-off baroque bathrobe and jorts, and fights in them for three books (Artifact blue jeans finally retire the jorts late in book III). He fights with a claw hammer, a floating screwdriver, bleach, water and the dead; the stolen compass and the store make him the Monarch’s most wanted man and, by the end of book III, owner of the Kiosk Network.

Croc

mimic · Dan’s best friend · I–III
A mimic cast out by his own kind as defective, who has spent decades trying to keep newcomers alive and passes as a Labrador-sized dog of blue clog-rubber with googly eyes. He can become a bear-sized beast with a fanged belly, a chair, a catapult, a sleigh or a sword; he loves Froyo and Twilight and cooks his kills. In book III Dan gives him a collar engraved “Dan’s Best Friend”, and he takes a killing beam for Dan.

Jakob

Cendral · I–III
A Transmog with pale serpent scales, violet hair and curling black horns who was once a human cancer researcher from Berlin. The first customer who can pay, he becomes the team’s tank and alchemist, fires sofas from a graffiti-sprayed bazooka, fights Delvers but will not kill them, and means to reach the bottom and learn what the God Box is. The Skinless Court flayed his left arm; a machine on the 75th floor heals it to white scales.

Temperance

Salem exile · Roomkeeper · I–III
Accused of witchcraft at Salem, her own fiancé swearing he saw her with a familiar, she fled into the woods and into the Backrooms, and lay frozen in a time pocket for some three hundred and thirty years until Jakob freed her. She fights in a pink bunny suit with a meat cleaver (later the peppermint-striped Dark Solstice Cleaver), commands a Roomkeeper war band against the Aspirants, hates heights, and has not sung since her town tried to burn her, until a funeral at the end of book III.

Marcus, the Boundless Wanderer

gunslinger · I (a legend in II–III)
A lanky gunslinger in a leather duster and steampunk goggles, with an oversized foam anime sword, a golden gauntlet with dice for knuckles and a battered Winnie-the-Pooh plush at his neck that heals him; the Monarch took his hand and an eye. He nearly kills the Monarch in book I’s third chapter and vanishes. Croc names him the Boundless Wanderer, the only one of the eight Sovereigns without a kingdom, and the books have not brought him back.

The Flayed Monarch

ruler of the 999th floor · I–III
Eight feet of flayed red muscle with four arms and a centipede’s body, an obsidian mask and a crown of black spikes floating above his head; lord of the Skinless Court and one of the eight Sovereigns. Dan walks off with his Mythic compass in book I’s opening chapters, and after that the Monarch never shows himself again: he fights Dan through his Aspirants and his allies, the HOA and the Franchisor of the 99th floor among them. By book III, Nikoli says, his court is at war on three fronts and, if rumour is right, he is not what he was.

The Researcher

the voice of the System · I–III
The absent scientist who signs the System’s floating yellow windows in the tone of a human-resources memo. In book III a recording on the 75th floor shows him at last, a tentacled being with one huge lidless eye, Head Researcher of a Progenitor ship moored on Earth, admitting that the Blight has reached the ship itself and that no Delver or Dweller may leave.

Wraith

Tribune of Howlers Hold · II (named in III)
Security chief and one of the three Tribunes of Howlers Hold, the furries’ safe harbor on floor 7: a short, broad Transmog in a blue fursuit, police riot gear and a cartoon bull mask, beneath which is a real bull’s head. He brings Dan his own wanted poster and the offer of an alliance, shows him the children born in the Hold, and asks him to be worth the risk.

Ed Myrl and Woodstock

Eternal Suburbia’s holdouts · II–III
A gaunt Vietnam veteran in an orange cap who has lived on the 24th floor for some forty years, since it was a black-and-white 1950s town, fighting the HOA’s signal with a ham radio, “Footloose” and a bomb called Big Bertha, and eating memories to stay himself. His partner is Woodstock, an African gray parrot the size of a house cat, a Delver herself, who promises fire. In book III they stay on the floor to help the Howlers settle it and to chase BEACON, the outfit Myrl blames.

Harper

healer · III
Harper Murphy, an Iride Transmog with porcelain skin, pointed ears and dragonfly wings, a former pediatric nurse who helps run the Howler clinic; Dan cuts her out of a mimic’s cocoon on floor 4. Her protective aura holds only while she harms no one. She drags Dan into the shield under fire, restarts his heart in the snow, kisses him at the Kringlegard feast, and at the end of book III asks him on a date; he asks for a rain check.

The golems

the store’s staff · I–III
Dan builds them from junk and a sacrificed Relic, one for every 5,000 square feet of store. Baby Hands, nine feet of cereal boxes, scrap and melted doll arms behind the Harmacist’s cracked plague-doctor mask, mops the aisles; Princess Ponypuff, a glittering patchwork of toys with a pink pony’s head, calls herself Legion, devourer of worlds, runs the till and never haggles. Book II adds Camo Joe, a security chief of camping gear and shadow; book III two camera-headed Devil Dogs and Sinclair, a four-armed bartender with a television for a head and a refined accent.

Winnie-the-Pooh

the 10,000 Acre Wood · III
A three-foot, sun-faded teddy bear with re-stitched seams and black marble eyes, tagged by the System as a Tea Shop Manager, who has searched his wood for Christopher Robin for decades. He guides the team to Steamboat Studios on Croc’s back, faces down a hydra with nothing but an old photograph, and learns that the man he called Christopher, James Graham, became the Franchisor. At the end he goes off to dinner with Harper and stays with the store.

Reading order

  • Read them in publication order, which is story order; there are no novellas or side stories. Start with .
  • I · Discount Dan: A LitRPG Adventure (Shadow Alley Press, Kindle, March 2025): fifty-five chapters and an epilogue.
  • II · Cul-de-sac Carnage: A LitRPG Adventure (Kindle, 1 July 2025): fifty-five chapters.
  • III · Kiosk Kingdom: A LitRPG Adventure (Kindle, 31 March 2026): sixty-two chapters, the longest.
  • Audiobooks: all three from Audible Studios, narrated by Steve Campbell: 15 h 27 min (11 March 2025), 17 h 49 min (1 July 2025) and 22 h 20 min (31 March 2026).
  • In print: independently published paperbacks and hardbacks, and Pan Macmillan Australia trade paperbacks for Australia and New Zealand (book I on 27 October 2026, II on 15 December 2026, III on 2 February 2027).
  • Next: Kiosk Kingdom’s back matter says that Dan’s adventure continues in Disco Inferno. No release date or store listing for it was found as of October 2026, and the Goodreads series page lists three books.
  • maps the floors, the System and the legend; it can be read first or last, but it spoils all three books.

Notes

  • How this was checked. The books’ text is not searchable anywhere online, so all three were read in full from the companion owner’s own Kindle copies: the page images were run through OCR for private reference, and every page of this walk was then fact-checked against that text by a separate checker. Public sources (Goodreads, the publisher and audio listings, the Backrooms wikis) are cited where they are used. Quotations are short and exact. The frames were painted by Grok (xAI) from prompts written by Claude. No copy of the text is linked or published here.
  • The author. James A. Hunter is a former Marine Corps sergeant and combat veteran, and a founder and the creative director of Shadow Alley Press, which publishes the series; Dan’s Marine years echo his own. His other series include Viridian Gate Online, Vigil Bound and, with eden Hudson, Rogue Dungeon and Wasteland Warlords.
  • Names as printed. Croc is “he” here, though the books use “it” as often; Jakob has a k; floors keep the books’ numbers (the Lobby is floor 0); and the books’ parody names (MediocreMart, Steamboat Studios) are kept.
  • Content. The books are gory, profane and crude by design. This walk keeps its quotations clean and its violence off-frame.
  • A collector’s edition. A Shadow Alley Press Kickstarter for a Mythic-Grade hardback of book I raised $127,672 from 863 backers on a $9,999 goal.

The whole walk: The Series · · · ·