The Butcher's Masquerade
The Butcher's Masquerade
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Matt Dinniman on The Butcher's Masquerade
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A palate cleanser that refused to stay simpleDinniman started the series in December 2019 not as an ambitious project but as a deliberate escape from one that had stalled. What he needed was speed and simplicity, which is exactly what the premise was not going to stay.
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.
Princess Donut, the cat who co-anchors the series, came directly from a decade Dinniman spent selling cat-themed artwork at Cat Fanciers’ Association events. That world gave him something specific: not just any cat owner, but the particular culture and psychology surrounding competitive show cats.
I used to sell cat-themed art and would travel to cat shows, so I learned a lot about that world and the people who live in that world. I knew I wanted to write something with not just any type of cat, but a show cat.
The sixth floor of the dungeon, the Hunting Grounds, where paying tourists enter to kill crawlers for sport, is the same preoccupation taken to its corporate extreme. The cat show circuit gave him a character; reality television’s monetization of suffering gave him the world she inhabits.
The game-show cruelty that saturates every floor of the dungeon, including the paid-hunter premise of The Butcher’s Masquerade, traces back to something Dinniman noticed about early 2000s reality television. The coliseum framing he reaches for is not decorative.
The moment money gets involved, everything becomes cruel and really dark. And it harks back to the whole idea of the coliseum, you know, where people are watching someone’s misfortune for fun. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
207 pages of spreadsheet and no outlineBy book five, Dinniman had been pantsing, writing by instinct without a plan, long enough that managing the consequences required an infrastructure of its own. The spreadsheet is not pre-planning; it is archaeology.
I make it all up as I go along with no outline and no plan. It’s how I prefer to write. Because of that, I have to keep track, or I simply wouldn’t be able to make it work. It’s like doodling on a giant canvas.
The practical version of that tracking system is a 207-page Excel file cataloguing every unanswered question and every planted detail that still needs a payoff. What the spreadsheet reveals is that pantsing at this scale is not improvisation but deferred construction.
I keep track of all the loaded Chekhov’s guns. I have a whole Excel sheet. I have to relisten and reread a lot, and I keep track of every unanswered question. But a lot of times, when I ask these questions in the first place, I don’t know what the answer is. It’s my favorite part of the process — making it up as I go along.
Samantha, who becomes a major force in The Butcher’s Masquerade, was not designed in advance. She emerged from the same improvisational logic the spreadsheet exists to manage, and her appeal as a character is inseparable from the freedom that method allows.
Samantha is chaos incarnate. She’s very fun to write because whatever pops into my head, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense at the time, I can make it make sense later.
Because Dinniman releases chapters to Patreon subscribers while he writes them, each scene has to deliver on the day a reader opens it. His solution is a spatial metaphor he uses while drafting: every scene should be pulling characters toward something, never letting them hold still.
I always want it slightly leaned. I always want everybody rolling towards a destination at all times. If I feel as if the scene is flat or worse, they’re receding, then I know I need to cut the scene or I need to add an element. [paraphrased from audio]
When momentum stalls anyway, Dinniman has a drafting technique that has nothing to do with plotting. He has used it on Carl, Donut, Mongo, and Zev, none of whom have died in the published books.
I’ll write the scene where one of the characters dies. No matter how innocuous the scene is. And I’ll go through and I’ll kill every single character in that scene to see how everybody reacts. And then I know how to get out of that scene because I know what’s at stake for everybody. [paraphrased from audio]
The print hardcover of The Butcher’s Masquerade also carries something readers of earlier digital editions did not get. Dinniman has been threading a parallel narrative through the physical books: ‘I have written a novella set in the DCC universe called Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret, and it is broken up into short story-sized fragments added at the end of each book’ — told from inside the dungeon’s non-player-character population.
What he wants us to sit with
Giant machines filled with ordinary peopleThe dungeon in The Butcher’s Masquerade is run by galactic corporations whose employees are not cartoonish villains. Dinniman has thought carefully about why that structure produces a more durable kind of menace than any single antagonist could.
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. It’s not just one person. It’s the whole group of people smooshed together, all with a common goal, which is not to have the person above them fire them. They are just trying to make money... 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.
The satire in The Butcher’s Masquerade has targets that extend well beyond science fiction world-building. Dinniman named them in a Before We Go Blog interview, and the final entry on his list is characteristically specific.
I tend to poke fun at all sorts of stuff, but most of it focuses on our obsession of keeping up appearances. At social media culture and reality television. And cocker spaniels.
The comedy, though, is not a tonal corrective applied when scenes get too heavy. Dinniman distinguishes between humor as authorial management and humor as character behavior, and the distinction matters for how the book’s darkness actually lands.
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.
Carl, the protagonist, plays a specific role in this. He takes every situation completely seriously; the absurdity of the dungeon’s staging, the AI commentary, the bureaucratic spectacle of the Hunting Grounds floor, is designed to make the audience laugh, not Carl. The joke and the horror occupy the same space without canceling each other.
Underneath the mechanics, the corporate satire, and the floor-by-floor escalation, Dinniman says the series has held to one consistent emotional argument. He stated it as plainly as he ever has in an interview with Gig Harbor Now.
These survivors are refusing to allow the darkness to overcome them. One of the main themes is: You will not break me.