The Gate of the Feral Gods
The Gate of the Feral Gods
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Matt Dinniman on The Gate of the Feral Gods
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A palate cleanser that swallowed the planDinniman began the series in December 2019 as a deliberate break between projects, expecting something self-contained and simple. The premise he had been chasing since childhood gave him just enough of a frame to start:
The whole stuck-in-a-game aspect of the story has been something I’ve been chasing since I saw the original TRON movie as a kid. When I discovered there was a whole genre of books that revolved around that premise, I knew I’d found a home.
By the time he reached Book 4, the story had accumulated an architecture he never drew a blueprint for. What started as a survival tale between a man and his cat had become something considerably more political, and looking back at that mutation is how he explains the series to new readers:
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.
That political machinery — alien corporations broadcasting human suffering as mass entertainment, with competing sponsors maneuvering for ratings advantage — sits at the structural center of Book 4, which is where Carl begins making deliberate moves against the system rather than simply enduring it.
The choice to build the antagonists as corporations rather than individuals has a philosophical underpinning that Dinniman returns to across multiple interviews. He sees it as the more honest model of how harm actually operates at scale, and the framing connects directly to why the dungeon in Book 4 feels less like a villain’s trap and more like a market:
I think it’s more realistic. 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, and they’re doing that by doing something not necessarily for the community’s best interest, if that makes sense. 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. I’ll always have individual bad guys, because that’s fascinating, too, but corporate evil feels so inevitable, like realistic cosmic horror.
How he wrote it
Two hundred pages of Excel and no mapDinniman’s method is consistent across every book in the series: no outline, no plan, and a tracking document that has grown monstrous in its attempt to compensate for both. By the time he was writing Book 4, the Excel spreadsheet that functions as his substitute for a blueprint had become its own substantial artifact:
I keep track of everything with a very extensive Excel sheet. But my process is a little bit of chaos. 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.
That same spreadsheet is where he manages the series’s web of unanswered questions. Dinniman plants setups without knowing their resolutions, which means he has to preserve both the question and the obligation to answer it. The spreadsheet is, in a structural sense, a list of promises he has made to himself:
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, whose soul occupies a talking sex-doll head and who is introduced in Book 4, is the most visible product of this method. She arrived with no backstory, no planned arc, and no obvious place in the larger plot. Her existence alone describes what pantser writing can produce:
I am what some people call a ‘pantser.’ That basically translates to ‘he makes it up as he goes along.’ I never planned on having a reanimated sex doll head a major, important character. But here we are. She’s not difficult to write because she’s my favorite side character by a mile.
What makes Samantha workable, once she exists, is that her characterization is so total it absorbs any contradiction. He can follow any instinct for her without pre-justifying it, because the coherence is supplied after the fact by her own internal logic:
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.
Beyond character and structure, the format of the series shapes the prose itself from the first draft. Audiobooks regularly outsell print in the LitRPG genre, and Dinniman writes with that audience’s experience built in from the start rather than adapted after:
I write everything with audio in mind.
Book 4 also introduces a growing technical problem that any long-running progression fantasy faces: characters accumulate power until challenges lose credibility. His approach is to ensure Carl is never the strongest person in any room, and to design situations where brute force fails and lateral thinking becomes the only viable currency. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Refusal as the only viable responseDinniman is explicit that the comedy in the series is not a structural layer he applies to dark material. It is a behavior that emerges from characters who are under extreme pressure and who cope the way most humans actually cope. That distinction matters for how Book 4 reads: the humor is not relief from the darkness, it coexists with it:
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.
By Book 4, Carl is angrier than he has been in any previous installment, and anger is a notoriously difficult register to sustain in a protagonist without losing reader sympathy. Dinniman describes his solution as a structural one: keep the humanity visible by engineering the right collisions:
Carl becomes a reluctant leader, and he’s angry. It’s difficult to write someone who’s angry and still make them compelling. I did my best to write as many scenes as possible where we see his humanity and have other characters he can bounce off.
Carl’s slow radicalization, his mounting anger at the alien entertainment machine running him and everyone he’s come to protect, reaches the point in Book 4 where he begins acting against the dungeon’s infrastructure rather than simply surviving it. Dinniman has condensed the series’s central argument to a single sentence, and it is the one he returns to when asked what the books are ultimately about:
One of the main themes is: You will not break me.