Corvin Cray has three problems: a warrant, an empty purse, and nowhere left to go. A deserter from the Imperial Legion after refusing an order to burn a refugee camp, he has spent six months on roads that lead nowhere useful. Then a rumor reaches him: a dungeon beneath an abandoned house, full of treasure, no one watching it.

The treasure is real. The rest of it he wasn't expecting.

Dungeon is a literary novel set inside the world of the 1977 text adventure game that would become Zork, one of the earliest and most influential works in the history of interactive fiction. Corvin moves through a dungeon built and maintained by the FROBOZZ Magic Company, a bureaucratic institution that warranties its boats for seventy-six milliseconds and posts tourism guidebooks beside its flood control infrastructure. The dungeon is dangerous, frequently absurd, and precise about its purpose: it is a selection mechanism, running continuously, waiting for the right person to finish it.

Corvin is not alone down there. There is a seamstress named Troi who has been underground for a month before he arrives and doesn't need him to find her. There is a pewter-gray lizard he names Spot, to signal he isn't taking it seriously. There is a thief who navigates full darkness without a lamp and has been in the dungeon long enough to have his own reasons for staying. And there is the dungeon itself, which has been watching Corvin since the first stair.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, and anyone who ever typed GO NORTH and meant it.