Oftentimes, the hardest part of writing a story is the beginning and the end. That's especially true when said story is unfolding over the course of ten books with hundreds of characters and all sorts of plotlines running alongside a zany main adventure. After exploding in popularity throughout the 2020s, Dungeon Crawler Carl is now facing the predicament of bringing its tabletop RPG-inspired story of a coast guard vet and a talking show cat climbing through an alien-constructed dungeon made of the remnants of their planet to an end. Readers have followed Carl and Princess Donut as they've leveled up, fought bosses, met other party members, and survived one floor after another, and now, after Book 8, A Parade of Horribles, they're firmly in the endgame.
Only two books remain in the Dungeon Crawler Carl saga, yet that's not entirely accurate. Author Matt Dinniman is writing one final chapter that he's splitting into two volumes, complete with a cliffhanger at the end of Book 9 that will lead directly into Book 10. It's a different approach compared to the previous novels, which tell their own stories across whatever floors they cover while still being connected to the wider narrative and the overall progression of Carl, Donut, and their party as crawlers. It's also, according to Dinniman, "easily the most difficult thing I've ever written."
The mastermind behind the LitRPG phenomenon sat down alongside audiobook narrator Jeff Hays for an interview with Collider's Maggie Lovitt at New York Comic Con, where he addressed the unique challenges of penning the final chapter of DCC. Knocking down every last domino he's set up across the previous 11 floors of the world dungeon is one thing, but Dinniman has also found it tricky to get out of the habit of introducing new smaller stories to be resolved in a later book. Each installment so far has set up a myriad of arcs to be concluded, and coming off Book 8, aside from what lies ahead for Carl and Donut amid the Celestial Ascendancy, there's still the matter of further unraveling Samantha's past, exploring Scolopendra's transformation from World Dungeon big bad to "sexy" level one crawler, and getting to the true purpose behind Dungeon Crawler World: Earth. There's no more room to hold things back for another release — it's go time, and Dinniman is trying to be careful with how he approaches things through Book 10.
"As far as my brain is concerned, this is just one book. I'm writing the last book, and some people say, 'What's the difference?' But the difference is actually kind of big, because every book so far has an arc to it that has a beginning, a middle, and end. And even though it's not a standalone story, because you have to have read the previous ones, it has its own self-contained storyline. This is going to be one large arc, and then where I split it will be important and will, like, resolve something. But it's still going to be... It's clearly going to be a part one and part two. But I'm the master at kicking the can, too. Like, I have lots of little storylines that I'm kind of like, 'I'll deal with that in the next book,' and I can't do that anymore. I have so many little spinning plates that need to be taken care of before we can finish the story, and I have to be careful not to add new ones, which I keep doing anyway because that's just the way I write."
'Dungeon Crawler Carl' Author Is Trying to Keep the Final Chapter Compact
Because DCC will be answering some of its biggest overarching questions about the Syndicate, the Primals, the System AI, and more, Dinniman also doesn't want to run into the issue of making a story so big it needs three books to resolve. He's already committed to wrapping things up in ten, so he's been trying to solve the problem of making an ending that feels definitive without having to stretch things out. "So it's a challenge, and it's a challenge not to make it super big," he concluded. "I can't allow myself to say, 'Okay, I'm gonna write 11 books,' and I'm not. I have to resolve the story, so it's very difficult." As hard as it is to say goodbye to these characters and the process of constructing this bizarre world, he lives for the challenge. "But it's fun, and that's why I do it," said Dinniman
Dungeon Crawler Carl books 9 and 10 don't have a release date or official titles yet, though the ninth installment has been going under the working title of The Beautiful Place. Stay tuned here at Collider for further updates. You can watch Lovitt's full conversation with Dinniman and Hays below.