American
Matt Dinniman is an American author best known for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, a LitRPG sequence in which a man and his former neighbor's cat are forced to compete in a deadly dungeon game staged for an alien audience. He began publishing the books himself online and as e-books, building a large readership through serialized releases and audiobooks. The first volume appeared in 2020, and later books followed at a steady pace. Ace, an imprint of Penguin Random House, later bought print rights to the early books and issued hardcover editions. Before the series, Dinniman wrote the Mordecai Hale mystery novels and the Expedition Dark Fantasy trilogy, and he also wrote travel guides. The Dungeon Crawler Carl books mix gruesome horror with dark comedy and detailed game mechanics. They have become some of the best-known and best-selling works of the LitRPG genre, and their success helped bring the form to a wider audience.