The Daily Grind

Blurb

An IT worker explores an alternate dimension in his office in the first book of a fun and fast-paced series blending cubical life and dungeon fantasy.

Working as overnight tech support, James Lyle has long said he’d do anything to escape the boredom. But his commitment to excitement is tested when a slight coincidence one shift sends him to a different part of his office building . . . and he discovers a stairwell that contains not stairs but rather a landscape of seemingly infinite cubicles against a distant horizon.

Unwilling (and unable) to stay away, James and a few of his trusted friends begin to explore this endless maze of supernatural business ennui, a few minutes in the real world turning into eight hours of encounters with strange creatures and even stranger interior design choices. But in a realm that allows them to level up in fax machine repair and provides them with enough cash to pay the rent, there are also adversaries that are quickly becoming dangerous—and potentially lethal.

As James, along with his companions, delves ever deeper into this extraordinary place, James starts to realize that animate staplers and time dilation might not be the biggest challenges they face, and those challenges might not stop at the entrance . . .

The Daily Grind is the epic beginning to a slice-of-life urban fantasy that effortlessly blends wry commentary on office life with intricate character- and world-building.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first published book.

The premise of this book spoke a lot to me. While I might not be an IT support worker on the graveyard shift, I have spent an uncomfortable amount of my life in an office environment. Some of that, I will admit, may have been spent daydreaming about what exactly I would do (and how I would change the world), if I suddenly had the powers of the characters in the last book or movie I’d seen.

I’m sure we all have such fantasies. The Daily Grind is one of these, put down to paper. What if I, Average Office Worker, found a seemingly infinite office-themed dungeon, where stables, computers, cables, plants, and so much more came to life in a weird ecosystem that is begging to be explored?

And what if, when killing those creatures, they dropped different sorts of skill orbs that would teach me things, from absolutely useless skills (like New York phonebook typesetting) or to something that would be useful (martial arts, coding skills, languages)?

You bet that I’d be in that dungeon every chance I got. And herein lies both the strength and weakness of the book in my opinion.

I enjoy the office dungeon and the skills. But, throughout the whole book, that’s sort of all that happens? It’s one office delve after another, over and over, and I was itching for the pace to increase. For them to crack how skill orbs work so they wouldn’t keep getting random (and therefore mostly useless) skills. For the MC (and Anesh) to do something radical, whether it was proper fortifications as they expand into the dungeon, crazy weapons, more taming of the office equipment. All of that they sort of start doing, but the min-maxer in me was bashing my head against the wall at their lack of progression in figuring any of it out properly. Hundreds and hundreds of pages, so many office delves, and still just random skills to show for it? Give me more, dammit!

Maybe it’s a good thing that I was getting frustrated because it meant I was getting into the setting a lot. Or maybe it means that the pacing here could be tightened? Who knows.

Outside of the contents of the plot, the writing is alright. The biggest technical problem for me was the constant point-of-view switches from one sentence to the next. At the start of the book (where it’s just the MC delving) this wasn’t an issue, but once more people get invited into the dungeon, the PoV starts hopping around in a really confusing manner, leaving me often unsure as to who was actually thinking and expressing certain feelings. It’s not as bad as Solo Levelling’s web novel, but it did make the end third of the book significantly harder to read.

Apart from that gripe though, the rest was fairly solid. I’m hoping that the pacing increases (and something interesting happens) in book two, and I’m going to personally wait for the KU version instead of reading ahead on RR.