A founding document: this is the video where the Dungeon Dive Book Club is born. Daniel (@dungeondive) opens with a candid channel update — his desire to play board games is at absolute zero (a recurring phase; he’s been scratching the dungeon itch with Grim Dawn, Torchlight 2, and Ghost of Tsushima instead) — but the book videos struck a chord, so he leans in and announces a club. The first pick is Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland, a Tor.com novella he calls a masterpiece, chosen deliberately: cheap, short, in print, and superb. He owns up to having avoided Kiernan for years, wrongly filing her under paranormal romance, until this book revealed one of the finest writers in weird fiction. His pitch paints the novella as a love letter to 1990s paranoia — Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM, Area 51, The X-Files — with a cult modelled on Heaven’s Gate at its centre, and he detours warmly into why that tragic group deserves a more sympathetic hearing than pop culture gives it. The plan: read it over the coming month, then meet on Google Hangouts with an adult beverage to talk it through.
The club was born because Daniel burned out on cardboard and pivoted to books mid-hobby. When your main hobby goes cold, what do you rotate to — and does it always come back?