Princess Donut, in her crown and goggles, riding Mongo - a purple 3D print on my shelf

I finished A Parade of Horribles (book 8 of Dungeon Crawler Carl) on my run today. I laughed out loud when the AI said the title of this post.

I’ve savored this series for the past eight months, listening to about one a month on Audible while I run.

If you don’t know this series, the setup is that an alien corporation destroys every man-made structure on Earth, drops the survivors into a dungeon, and broadcasts the whole thing as the most popular game show in the galaxy. The protagonist, Carl, goes down in his boxers and no shoes because he ran outside chasing his ex-girlfriend’s cat Donut. The cat comes with him and becomes the co-protagonist.

Here are all eight books, in order. Start at the beginning.

Dinniman’s world building is incredible. As I work through Zero Knowledge, which if it is any good, will be book 1 of at least several, my world building is “now, in geographies I know.” That’s not very hard. But, if I get to book 2 of my own series, well, since it’s a quantum computing novel, we will have some interesting world building to do.

What I’ve learned, through reading an enormous amount of fiction (especially science fiction), is that world building can’t simply be decoration. It has to be integral to the plot. This varies by genre - in LitRPG (the genre of DCC), the rules of each level of the dungeon are the plot, governed by the AI. And, it gets better, more complicated, and more challenging the deeper they go. At some point, the AI becomes a third major protagonist, and the book becomes very meta with the world building at the heart of it. If you are a fan of Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons (RIP) like I am, you’ll recognize this.

Underneath all of it is endless satire. The dungeon is a monetized entertainment product. There are ad breaks, brand sponsorships, loot boxes, influencer contracts, and a live audience placing bets on which humans die next. Dinniman never stops to explain the joke, and doesn’t have to, as he cycles back around to make his social commentary sharper and sharper as the series goes on.

Carl, Princess Donut, and the AI are the stars. Carl is a genuinely decent person who becomes progressively more terrifying without ever really losing his fundamental decency. Donut is a show cat with a Charisma stat and no impulse control. And, she’s fucking hilarious. The AI narrates the whole thing in a register somewhere between a game-show host and a war criminal, hands out achievements with the contempt they deserve, and turns out to have its own character arc.

Three major character arcs over eight books is a lot. But Dinniman has many others that he sustains over multiple books. Mordecai, their trainer, is a former crawler carrying deep, personal grief. Katia starts as a scared woman who barely speaks and ends up as an extraordinary bad ass with an incredible moral compass. There are dozens of overlapping characters, some who persist through each book, others who show up as a throwaway segment on one floor only to become critical a few floors later, with the arcs accumulating. People who should be villains turn out to be trapped by the same machine. When people you trust die, you feel it. When the bad guys die, you cheer. And, when the twists happen, you, like I did, will go “whoa - I didn’t see that coming.”

Dinniman is writing an ensemble under escalating pressure where everyone gets a real interior life, including the ones you are supposed to hate. I fantasize that I will get good at that with my writing.

I’ve now added Matt Dinniman to my list of favorite authors, which include:

Donut and Mongo sit on the shelf above all of them.

The shelf in my office - Donut and Mongo, a wind-up robot, and a few hundred books underneath

Dinniman has said the story ends with book nine, published in two volumes. Peacock has ordered a TV series. I’m not sure how any of it survives the translation to television, but I’ll watch it.

When I started writing Zero Knowledge, I listed Dinniman as one of my influences for Phin to build into our writing profile. That was after book six. Two books later I’d add something else, which is that he never wastes a scene. The stuff that reads like filler on one floor is the setup for something six floors down.

Now I have to wait, which means exhibiting some impulse control, which neither Donut nor I are particularly good at.