Read by Alec Volz

As a 12-year-old in England in 1976, Barrowcliffe (Lucky Dog) made a fateful choice: he started
playing Dungeons and Dragons. Role-playing games were just beginning their rise, and Barrowcliffe,
along with 20 million other socially maladapted boys, spent his adolescence in dining rooms and
basements as a druid, warrior or magician, throwing oddly shaped dice and slaying monsters.
While D&D allowed Barrowcliffe to escape his mundane, much-bullied existence in an all-boys school,
it also threw him into an equally cruel nerdiverse of Nazi wannabes, boys with nicknames like Rat
and Chigger, and his polymath, Falstaffian best friend who once ate a still-frozen chicken pie on
a bet. Barrowcliffe, whose own schoolboy nickname was Spaz, wonderfully captures the insensitivity,
insecurity and selfishness of the adolescent male. His eye for the oddities of 1970s British life
is equally astute. At times, Barrowcliffe's relentlessly self-deprecating humor descends into
a tedium of self-loathing. The book also loses some of its focus toward the end when D&D gives way
to heavy metal clubs and tolerant girlfriends. However, these are minor imperfections when measured
against the quality of the author's vision. Barrowcliffe renders all the comedy and sorrow of early
manhood, when boys flee the wretchedness of their real status for a taste of power in imaginary domains.

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