In March, I picked up a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl. It consumed me. I spent the next four weeks tearing through the seven available books in the series. All I wanted to do was read. All other media tasted like sand.
At one point, when I was finishing the fifth book in the series, The Butcher’s Masquerade, my husband asked, “How many more do you have?”
“Just two.”
“Okay, good,” he said, “I miss you.”
I evangelized DCC to my coworkers, my improv team, my friends, my family, any poor soul standing next to me at a dinner party, and so on. My husband is now on book six.
It’s set in Seattle—sort of. Our main character, coastguard veteran Carl, has broken up with his cheating girlfriend. He’s alone in their Queen Anne apartment with her show-winning cat, Princess Donut, who jumps out the window at 2:23 a.m. Carl follows her outside. Then every building in the world collapses. Aliens have taken over Earth to mine its natural resources. Anyone indoors during the collapse died. The survivors can win back their planet by fighting their way through an 18-level subterranean dungeon as part of an intergalactic reality TV show run by a corporation of alien fish and steered by a horny AI. The contestants—crawlers—level up as they go like a real-life game of Dungeons & Dragons. Carl, barefoot and only in his boxers, enters with Princess Donut into a fight for their lives and for humanity.
Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is part of a genre called LitRPG, is like nothing I’d read before. It’s campy, exciting, a little stupid, and full of heart. And, it’s local. Author Matt Dinniman lives in Gig Harbor.
Interest in his books is booming and the Pacific Northwest enthusiasm is particularly off the rails. Local businesses have made Dungeon Crawler Carl chocolate bars and tea blends. Elliott Bay has cleared two shelves of its sci-fi section for DCC, which elicits the occasional grumble from staff. It’s having such a moment that Seth MacFarlane purchased the television rights for the series in April.
I had to talk to Dinniman, who I want to call Matt (all his fans call him Matt), but we don’t know each other like that. I tried shortly after I finished book six, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, to interview him about the impending book eight, A Parade of Horribles, which dropped May 12. This did not work out. Attempting to interview Matt Dinniman was like entering my own 18-level dungeon.
Dinniman originally self published DCC back in 2020. Penguin Random House licensed the right to publish them from him back in 2024 and re-released the books in glossy hardcovers, but Dinniman maintains all control over the property and its licensing. As a self-publisher, Dinniman developed an intimate relationship with his audience that has fed arabid fandom. He runs a DCC subreddit, discord server, and a Patreon where subscribers can decide elements of the book. The subredditors say he’s extremely responsive. This was not my experience.
After a few emails, I contacted his publisher Penguin Random House. After a month of back and forth, they offered an email interview. He was too popular, and too busy with conventions and prep for his book tour, for anything more.
I acquiesced. I sent my questions on May 4 and 15 minutes later Random House said I’d hear back in June. June? The guy who published eight books—4,782 pages—in six years needed a month to respond?
I suspected the publisher hadn’t even reached out. Whatever. I would still write my article. I’d write around the interview.
“I am currently in the middle of The Butcher’s Masquerade, so this is a fun request for me,” a KCPL worker wrote when I asked for the country library’s circulation numbers. As of 2026, the King County Public Library has circulated its copies of the Carl books, e-books, and audiobooks 4,192 times. They’re all checked out currently and hundreds of people have them on hold.
In the email thread, another worker chimed in, “I can also add that Matt was a featured author at this year’s King County Library System Foundation Gala in March.”
I tried not to feel jealous. If I’d discovered Dungeon Crawler Carl a month earlier, I’d have been there.
Then I reached out to Maeve, formerly Seattle Chocolates, which released Princess Donut’s Virgin Dirty Shirley chocolate bar in April: dark chocolate on the top and bottom, white chocolate raspberry and cherry filling with actual cherry chunks, and Pop Rocks for the “fizzy effervescence of soda” in the middle. The bar is themed off DCC’s feline heroine, Donut’s favorite drink in the dungeon. (She doesn’t know a Virgin Dirty Shirley is a Shirley Temple.She’s just a cat.) It sold out in 36 hours.
“That has never happened to us before,” says brand manager Ellie Thompson on a video call.
Thompson became a fan of the books last fall. She DM’d Dinniman about the chocolate bar collaboration.
“He’s just been amazing to work with,” Thompson says. “Like, he responds to our emails faster than any of my coworkers, like, literally within five minutes. He’s just so available.”
I nodded along on our video call, dying.
Maeve also built a DCC-themed safe room in their Tukwila factory. In the books, crawlers enter safe rooms to sleep, eat, and find respite from violent mobs. The morning the safe room opened, a woman was waiting outside, eager to be the first on inside.
“It’s been amazing,” Thompson says. “I think we all feel a sense of pride. Like, that’s our local author.”
Friday Elliott, owner of Friday Afternoon Tea in Fremont, put together a box set of eight teas that correspond to each book. Elliot says she has lexical-gustatory synesthesia, a rare neurological phenomenon that allows her to literally taste words and feelings and personalities, abstract concepts, all of that.”
Before we got into flavors, she asked, “Oh, have you spoken to Matt?”
I told her I hadn’t and changed the subject. When had she discovered the series?
“Before it existed,” she says. “Actually, Matt and I are old friends.”
No fucking way.
Elliott and Dinniman met 13 years ago as vendors on the convention circuit. Elliott sold fandom teas. Dinniman was selling his illustrations and collages. Before DCC, Dinniman drew elite felines at cat shows, an experience that inspired Princess Donut. Elliott and Dinniman last saw each other at Emerald City Comic Con, where she ran the punny name of each tea she’d dreamed up for a potential boxset by him. They include: “Dungeon Cardamom Carl, The Butcher’s Matchanade, The Chai of the Bedlam Bride, This Inevitable Rooibos, and A Puerade of Horribles.”
“He was like, ‘That’s so stupid you should actually do it,’” she laughs. He told her to go ahead and sell the teas and he would make sure she didn’t get sued. Coming up through the fandom world, he understands the trickiness of intellectual property and copyright, Elliott says. The teas sold out in seconds. She wasn’t sued.
“He’s always just been in the dealer hall with the rest of us,” Elliott says. Next year, he’ll be the guest of honor at one of the cons he used to vend at, Norwest Con. “He’s a real hometown hero for Northwest vendors.”
Well, Matt sounds pretty cool. I sure wish I could… speak with him.
At the end of our interview, I nonchalantly asked if she would text him for me. Elliott laughed. She did not text him.
The book release came and went. I consumed Parade of Horribles as if I were Prepotente, the series’ talking Italian goat character, sucking down a bottle of soda. (You’ll get it when you finish book seven, This Inevitable Ruin.) Still, nothing from Dinniman.
Then I remembered. He had one more stop on his book tour at the Lake Forest Park Third Place Books. The event had sold out in three hours in March, but I’m the press, baby and no other media outlet had dispatched their journalists to a book signing for a weird ass sci-fi series. I was in.
Milo Michels, assistant events manager at Third Place, had planned a DCC event at an old job, working the University Bookstore, when Penguin Random House published its hardcover editions in 2024. About 100 people came. There were 800 people at Third Place Books, many in heart-covered boxers, several barefoot. Michels says Third Place had to order more copies of Parade of Horribles last minute. “The publisher didn’t even anticipate this interest,” Michels says.
Someone painted themselves like the fish alien running the crawl. People wore cat ears and tiaras. One person dressed up as the character Bautista, a human who turns into a tiger-humanoid known as a Tigran.
I expected to interview the fans and maybe stick my hand up during the Q&A. Dinniman had just become the number one author on the New York Times Bestseller list. He would have no time for me.
Except he did. When Third Place Books employees told him what paper I was with he said, “The Stranger? That’s the cool one,” proving that he was a man of taste and giving credence to my theory that Random House had never sent him my interview request.
“What’s Carl’s Dick’s order?” I asked.
“His what?”
“Oh, you know, Dick’s Drive-In?”
“Oh. He’ll get two burgers, not the Deluxe, just the regular cheeseburgers and the fries and a strawberry milkshake.”
No Deluxe? This made sense. Carl is a glutton for punishment. The shake order was a shock. I assumed Carl was a chocolate guy.
“Carl’s most definitely not a chocolate person,” Matt says. Sorry to Maeve, the chocolate company.
Then I asked a real question: What about his series has resonated with so many people, especially locally?
“Carl is just a regular guy who’s living his life, and he suddenly finds himself in a situation where people who are a lot stronger than him are pushing down on him and exploiting him and people he loves just because they can make a profit,” he says. “He pushes back against that, and I suspect a lot of people enjoy these books because of that aspect.” He pauses. “Plus, there’s a talking cat in it.”
It’s that, but there’s something else, too. I was reminded of my conversation with Elliott, the tea shop owner who can taste books. Her brew for the third book is “The Dungeon OolongChrist’s Cookbook,” a pun on the book’s title The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook. The tea contains charcoal roasted Oolong, magnolia flower, a touch of brandy flavoring to memorialize a character’s death, and apple.
“The freeze dried apple gives this really bright, optimistic aspect in the midst of the more industrial and melancholic notes,” Elliott told me. Each tea has a similar note.“That sort of bright optimism is always a key part of every single book. There’s always this hope. There’s despair and there’s hope in tandem.”
Perhaps that hope is the real secret ingredient. That and the talking cat.
