At first glance, the highway coffee shops of Gig Harbor don’t suggest fertile ground for fantasy. Too many chain stores, lots of minivans and soccer cleats. But for the past six years, this humble, strip mall–based caffeine circuit has provided the workspace for science fiction and fantasy author Matt Dinniman to crank out doorstop-size entries in his breakout series, Dungeon Crawler Carl, a collection of international bestsellers. It adds an eighth volume, A Parade of Horribles, this week.
Dinniman, in his early 50s, is a gray-bearded, nerd-coded, genial guy with an unfathomable productivity streak. He’s been living in Gig Harbor since 2012, and before the pandemic struck he’d been cobbling together a six-figure salary selling cat art to pet enthusiasts. As the world shut down, he stopped attending cat shows and turned his attention to his recently launched project and its different sort of feline: a fictional tortoiseshell Persian Princess Donut.
At the outset of novel Dungeon Crawler Carl, Donut barely escapes Earth’s downfall with her owner’s ex-boyfriend, a US Coast Guard veteran named Carl. The duo is thrust into a reality TV dungeon-crawling show operated by aliens for the universe’s gambling pleasure.
“When I started the book,” Dinniman says, “I was like, I’m not gonna show this to anybody. I’m just writing something stupid and fun. But I’m still gonna put everything I have into it.”
Image: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Dinniman had been a serious genre fiction fan since childhood, inhaling library books when his dad’s army job moved the family from state to state. He’d written novels and short stories before. But Dungeon Crawler Carl comprised an unheralded synthesis of his many cultural interests, bringing together old horror novels, high fantasy (wizards and elves), and, perhaps most important, video games. The new story was part of a newfangled genre called LitRPG, short for literary roleplaying game, in which a book’s main characters progress through a series of levels, gaining stats and collecting items on the way.
Dinniman began posting Dungeon Crawler Carl on a LitRPG website, Royal Road. “I wasn’t anticipating even publishing it on Amazon or anything,” he says, “because this was going to be kind of like my fun thing. And then, you know, then the pandemic happened, and I was kind of forced into trying to make money out of it.”
As its eponymous hero climbed up the alien-run leaderboard in Dinniman’s intergalactic survival event, Dungeon Crawler Carl vaulted up the Royal Road trending lists when readers recognized the dense plotting, witty dialogue, and Dinniman’s offbeat, frequently ribald humor. characters is a decapitated sex doll head; in the third book, Donut visits a strip club called Penis Parade. Other plot points are even more X-rated, and it gets rather gory.
In October 2020, Dinniman self-published the work on Amazon. The audiobook dropped a few months later. “When book two came out, it started to get a little more popular,” he says. “I would go online, and I would see someone mention it without me having to do anything, without me being the one that started the conversation. That was really cool.” Even so, Dinniman saw it as a relatively minor success, calling the LitRPG community “kind of a micro niche.”
Image: Sipa USA/Alamy Stock Photo
Dinniman soon connected with a literary agent and signed a unique contract that allowed him to maintain digital rights while Ace Books (a subsidiary of Penguin Random House) sold print editions. In December 2025, The New York Times reported that the Dungeon Crawler Carl series—then seven books deep—had sold over . It was a proverbial needle in the self-publishing haystack, a kind of breakout success seen only by books like The Martian or 50 Shades of Grey. The paper documented the hullabaloo at New York Comic Con when Dinniman’s autograph line was filled with fans in costumes—cat whiskers, tiaras, and Carl’s heart-printed boxer shorts.
Dungeon Crawler Carl has succeeded in part because of Dinniman’s commitment to fans and his determined writing pace (he’s no George R. R. Martin, whose last installment dropped 15 years ago. But the series’ audiobooks, narrated by Jeff Hays, have provided the biggest commercial spark. Hays is a sort of one-man vocal circus, an encyclopedic trove of accents and sound effects. “It fit my own tastes perfectly,” Hays told an interviewer last year.
When Dinniman asks how many fans first experienced Dungeon Crawler Carl as an audiobook, “It’s always like 75 percent of people,” he says. “But they’re fans, and they want something physical.”
As Dinniman’s sales numbers and public profile continue to grow, his everyman’s writing routine is perhaps more important than ever. Earlier this year, he published a standalone science fiction novel, also gaming-related, called Operation Bounce House. Dungeon Crawler Carl has spun off into an actual tabletop game, merchandise, and a television series for Peacock, developed by Seth MacFarlane.
But on most days, Dinniman continues to write Carl and Donut into—and, hopefully, out of—progressively treacherous dungeon floors. The heroes hurtle toward the center of a hostile alien universe constructed, almost entirely, in the quiet coffee shops of Gig Harbor.
