Matt Dinniman Audiobooks

Matt Dinniman is an American writer who spent years doing almost anything else. He wrote obituaries for a newspaper in Yakima, Washington, then drew portraits of people’s pets at trade shows, and when the pandemic closed those shows down he turned to the serial he had been posting free on Royal Road since 2019.

That serial was Dungeon Crawler Carl. Self-published on Amazon in 2020, it built its audience the slow way, chapter by chapter and reader by reader, until Penguin Random House took the print rights for its Ace imprint while Dinniman kept the ebook and audio rights he had earned. The books have since reached the New York Times list and picked up a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The writing itself is a strange and effective hybrid: slapstick, apocalyptic game-show satire, real dread, and an emotional core carried in large part by a cat. He writes fast, plots meticulously across very long arcs, and takes his own absurd premise seriously enough to make the stakes hurt.

Begin at the beginning. Dungeon Crawler Carl is by some distance the most reviewed title on this page, and the audio edition explains why: Jeff Hays and the Soundbooth Theater team perform it rather than simply read it, with full character voices, sound design and a Princess Donut who has become famous in her own right.

From there the series runs in order through Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, The Gate of the Feral Gods, The Butcher’s Masquerade, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride and This Inevitable Ruin, with the later volumes rated even higher than the first and running well past twenty hours apiece. A Parade of Horribles carries the run onward.

Operation Bounce House, read by Travis Baldree, stands outside the dungeon altogether and makes a good test of whether the voice suits you before committing to a long series. Everything currently available is listed below.