Dungeon Crawler Carl
Dungeon Crawler Carl
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Matt Dinniman on Dungeon Crawler Carl
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A palate cleanser that refused to stay smallThe book began as deliberate downshift. Dinniman had just finished one novel and was eyeing a third entry in an existing series, and he needed a pressure-free gap between them, something he could write quickly without consequences.
Around the end of 2019, I just finished writing a book called Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I was about to move into the third book in my Dominion of Blades series, and I wanted to give myself a break. I thought, I’m going to write something real simple, real fast, kind of like a palate cleanser. That’s when I started Dungeon Crawler Carl, not expecting it to take off in the way it did.
The LitRPG form, a genre that layers video-game mechanics like leveling, stats, and skill trees directly into prose narrative, came to Dinniman through badly translated Russian novels at his local library around 2015. He was already a lifelong gamer, but encountering the form in fiction hit him differently.
First time you read one [a LitRPG novel], you say to yourself, ‘I didn’t know you could do that in a book.’ [paraphrased from audio]
That recognition of what the form permitted stayed with him. When he sat down for his palate cleanser in late 2019, the alien game show idea from his notebook finally had a structure it could live inside.
Princess Donut, the Persian show cat who becomes Carl’s dungeon companion, arrived from a single real encounter. Dinniman was working his pet-art booth at a Cat Fanciers’ Association show when a tiny tortoiseshell kitten spent an entire weekend glaring at him from the cage beside him.
I said, ‘I’m gonna write a book with that cat in it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
His original plan was for Donut to enter the dungeon and then mostly disappear, resurfacing only much later. That plan lasted almost no time at all.
The dungeon-as-game-show premise drew on something Dinniman had been watching happen to reality television for years. He had noticed a specific shift in how those shows treated their participants, and it led him back to a much older spectacle.
The moment money gets involved, everything becomes, starts to become cruel and really dark. And it hearkens back to the whole idea of the Colosseum, you know, where people are around there watching someone’s misfortune for fun. And that’s kind of a big influence on the whole idea of Dungeon Crawler Carl being a series as a whole. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Eight hundred thousand words and a spreadsheetDinniman’s refusal to outline is not a casual preference but a structural requirement of how he stays engaged. Knowing the destination in advance, for him, kills the work.
It’s my favorite part of the process—making it up as I go along. If I know the answer ahead of time for certain, if I have an outline, I’m not going to enjoy the process. So it’s important to me to not know the answer.
Writing without an outline at serial scale produces a specific cost. Dinniman generates far more material than any single book can hold, and the gap between what he writes and what survives is significant enough to threaten his mental health.
I may write 800,000 words for a book that ends up only being 270,000. And that’s not good for an author’s mental health.
To keep track of every planted question and unanswered thread across thousands of pages, Dinniman logs them in an Excel spreadsheet. Many of those entries have no answer yet when he writes them in, which means the spreadsheet is simultaneously a record of what he has promised readers and a list of problems he has not yet solved.
On my Patreon, I have [readers] vote for things that happen in the book. They always screw me over every single time by picking the most bizarre things.
Cuba became the setting for the eighth floor because Patreon subscribers voted for it, sending him through weeks of books and YouTube documentaries about a country he had never written about. The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, an in-world artifact that shapes multiple subsequent books, was also a Patreon vote.
The humor in the series was never engineered into a schedule of light scenes following dark ones. Dinniman describes the comedy as something that emerged from the characters rather than from any deliberate tonal calibration on his part.
I never intended for this to be a funny story, but the concept along with some of the characters—specifically Princess Donut (who is given sapience and the ability to talk in an early chapter)—allows for some really bizarre and ultimately funny scenarios. I don’t go out of my way to say ‘Okay, that scene was pretty dark. Let’s make a funny scene now.’ Instead, I try to rely on the characters themselves to get from point A to B, and humor is oftentimes a major coping mechanism.
Dinniman wrote the series for audio from the start, and that decision shaped the prose at the sentence level. Narrator Jeff Hays voices a cast that runs well into the dozens, and Dinniman has been deliberate about making that difficult.
I write for audio, I always have.
Audiobook sales now exceed print and ebook combined, which means the version most readers actually encounter is the one Dinniman was optimizing for all along.
The personal thread
A million readers and the weight of thatThe political complexity that saturates the later books was not part of any plan. It grew out of the writing itself, and Dinniman has been candid that he did not see it coming when he sat down with a simple premise.
When I first started writing it, I was writing a very simple straightforward story about a dude and his cat on an alien game show. I wasn’t anticipating such a complicated overarching political plot. As I started working and going on, that’s kind of what happened.
The readership that accumulated around that evolving story now numbers in the millions, and the emotional stakes readers bring to each new book have become a real weight. Dinniman gave a specific account of what that pressure now costs him personally.
By the time I was done with Book 3, ‘The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook,’ I had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it. And now, I will literally have over a million people read ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Book 8. And that’s a lot of pressure... I have people tell me that they’ve been suicidal, and they’re putting off killing themselves because they’re waiting for my book. And that’s a lot of pressure — that’s weight on my own mental health.
What he wants us to sit with
Corporate evil as cosmic horrorCarl, the series’ protagonist, is ordinary in the most deliberate sense. Dinniman built him as a specific counter-argument to the chosen-one model, which sets up the series’ central tension: the dungeon needs someone extraordinary, and Carl is not that person.
He’s not complicated. He’s not a ‘chosen one.’ He’s not someone who wants to be, or would even be good at, being a leader. But sometimes we don’t get what we want in life.
The system pressing down on Carl is not run by a single villain with a plan. Dinniman designed the antagonists as organizations, and he has a specific theory for why that form of evil is the most frightening kind.
A lot of times, the bad guys don’t consider themselves to be the bad guys. When it’s a corporation, it’s a lot more realistic... They are just trying to make money, and they’re doing that by doing something not necessarily for the community’s best interest... As a result, you come up with these giant machines that are filled with people who aren’t necessarily evil one-on-one, but they create evil. That’s always going to be fascinating to me... corporate evil feels so inevitable, like realistic cosmic horror.
Against that machinery, the series arrives at a single refusal. Dinniman has named it directly as the thematic spine underneath everything else.
These survivors are refusing to allow the darkness to overcome them. One of the main themes is: You will not break me.