Do you have a moment to talk about Dungeon Crawler Carl?

A couple of months ago I started reading a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl. I’m now on book six. They’re not short books.

My feeds noticed. I couldn’t tell you when it happened, but at some point Threads, which I only open when a notification drags me in, became mostly about this book. So did a good chunk of YouTube and Facebook. Reddit is worse, or would be if I didn’t avoid it for fear of spoilers from books I haven’t read yet. Going by my phone, it’s the biggest thing in books.

Going by real life, it doesn’t exist. Nobody I know had heard of it before I started going on about it.

So which is it? Is this a huge series I was late to, or a niche thing that an algorithm has decided I’m now part of? I work with data, so I went and counted.

What Dungeon Crawler Carl is

I’ve tried explaining it to my girlfriend. I usually get as far as aliens, a staircase into a dungeon and a talking cat, and that’s where I see the blank look.

To be fair, that is the book. One night every building on Earth vanishes, and most of the people in them with it. The survivors have to go down into a dungeon built by aliens and fight their way through it, floor by floor, while the whole thing is broadcast as a galaxy-wide reality show. Carl goes in wearing his boxer shorts, along with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, a show cat who can now talk.

I honestly can’t say why I kept reading past the talking cat. Part of it is that the book doesn’t ease you in. There’s no preamble: something enormous happens on the first page and you’re straight into it. And part of it is that it didn’t look like anything I’d read before.

It’s part of a genre I didn’t know existed: LitRPG, short for literary role-playing game. The characters live inside a game system and the book shows you the game. You get stat screens, levels, loot boxes and notifications from the system, printed right there in the text. The name dates from Russian web fiction around 2013, and in English the genre grew up on Royal Road, a free site where authors post stories a chapter at a time. Popular serials then move to Kindle Unlimited and, crucially, to audiobooks.

That’s exactly how Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC from here on) started. Matt Dinniman began posting it on Royal Road in late 2019, self-published the first book on Amazon in September 2020, and the audiobook followed in January 2021.

So it’s a self-published book from a genre most people have never heard of. Here’s how it compares with books they have.

Big compared with what?

Goodreads is the biggest site for logging and rating books. It isn’t a headcount of readers, but it measures every book the same way, which makes it a decent yardstick for comparing them. On 15 October 2026 I pulled the number of ratings for the first book in DCC and five others:

• three books that went properly mainstream: Fourth Wing, Project Hail Mary and The Thursday Murder Club;
• two of DCC’s closest relatives: He Who Fights with Monsters and Cradle, both big self-published series that started online.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has 678,000 ratings. That’s about ten times either of its genre neighbours, so it isn’t just a big book within LitRPG. It’s in a different league.

The comparison I didn’t expect is The Thursday Murder Club. That’s a book I’d actually heard of before all this. It came out the same month as DCC, September 2020, a week earlier. It has 872,000 ratings, so DCC has about 78% of its count.

Project Hail Mary and Fourth Wing are still well ahead, at 1.9 million and 4 million. I should admit I hadn’t heard of either of those until I went looking for benchmarks, which says something about how good I am as a yardstick.

One caveat: Goodreads leans American, and The Thursday Murder Club is a very British book, so its count probably understates how well known it is here.

Does it read like its genre?

My first theory was that DCC’s readers are mostly listeners. The audiobooks are famous: the narrator, Jeff Hays, does a whole cast of voices, and the author says audio outsells print and ebooks combined. If most fans listen, they’d be invisible on Goodreads and in bookshops, which might explain why nobody at the pub has heard of it.

I can’t get Audible’s sales figures. I can get its ratings counts, which come from a public catalogue. So for each book I worked out how many Audible ratings (US store) there are for every 100 Goodreads ratings. A high number means the book’s audience lives in audio.

The theory doesn’t survive. The audio-heavy book is He Who Fights with Monsters, with 89 Audible ratings for every 100 on Goodreads. Cradle is at 20. That’s what this genre normally looks like: it’s read through the ears.

DCC is at 10.6, lower than Project Hail Mary. By this measure its audience looks like a mainstream book’s audience, not a LitRPG one. I’m part of that too. I read it on a Kindle.

Ratings aren’t sales. People who rate on Audible and people who rate on Goodreads have different habits, and the author’s claim about audio sales could easily still be true. What this does show is who turns up to talk about the book afterwards, and for DCC that’s people outside the genre’s usual crowd.

When did it get out?

Google Trends shows how much people search for something over time, scaled so the busiest month in a comparison is 100. Here’s DCC against the same benchmarks since 2023.

For years, DCC barely registers. Then from mid-2024 it climbs, and it keeps climbing almost every month. By October 2026 it’s searched for more than Project Hail Mary, and far more than The Thursday Murder Club.

The shape matters as much as the height. The other books spike when something happens, a film or a new book, and then fall back. DCC doesn’t spike. It just goes up.

The climb starts around August 2024. That month Penguin Random House started publishing the books in print, and Universal bought the TV rights, with Seth MacFarlane’s company producing. Since then there’s been a seventh and eighth book, and in June 2026 Peacock ordered the TV series. I can’t tell you which of those did it. Lots happened at once and the line is smooth, not stepped, which looks more like word of mouth than any one event.

The reported sales tell the same story. When the TV rights were sold in August 2024, the books had sold “over a million copies”. By July 2026 it was more than 14 million across the eight books. Those figures come from the author and publisher, nobody audits them, and the two counts may not be like for like, but that’s a lot of growth in two years.

The last dotted line on the chart is me, starting book one in August 2026. Very much late to the party.

Bubble or breakout?

Not a bubble. On every measure I could find, Dungeon Crawler Carl has left its genre behind. It’s ten times the size of its nearest relatives on Goodreads, its readers look like a mainstream book’s readers, and people are searching for it more each month, not less.

It’s also not Fourth Wing. It hasn’t reached the people who don’t seek books out, which is why nobody I know has heard of it. It’s somewhere in between: a book that broke out of its niche and is still on its way up.

So my feed wasn’t lying, but it wasn’t a fair sample either. A feed shows you more of what you’ve just shown interest in, so of course mine looks like DCC is the only book in the world. But the people I know aren’t a fair sample either. I hadn’t heard of Project Hail Mary until I went looking for benchmarks, and it has 1.9 million ratings.

And the biggest jump out of the niche hasn’t happened yet. In June 2026 Peacock ordered a live-action series straight to a full season, skipping the usual pilot episode. Chris Yost, who has written for The Mandalorian and Thor: Ragnarok, is adapting it, and Seth MacFarlane’s company is producing. There’s no cast and no date yet. But a TV show reaches people who’d never pick up a book about a man and a talking cat in a dungeon, and that’s exactly the audience DCC hasn’t reached.

Having read six books, I have no idea how they’re going to film it. Half of what happens in the dungeon seems impossible to put on screen, and I can’t even picture the set design.

The other question I’m left with is what happens in bookshops. When something breaks out of a genre like this, other authors notice, and these days a book can be churned out with AI in a fraction of the time it used to take. Is Amazon filling up with DCC lookalikes, people trying to cash in on the hype? That’s a job for another post.

How I did this

All the numbers were collected on 15 October 2026.

• Goodreads: ratings for the first book of each series, from each book’s public page (linked where each book first comes up). Ratings are counted across all editions.
• Audible: ratings counts from Audible’s public catalogue API (unofficial docs), US store, using the main English edition of each book.
• Google Trends: worldwide, monthly, from June 2020 (the comparison). The values are relative to the busiest month in the comparison, so only compare shapes and ratios, not absolute numbers.
• Timeline and sales: from the author’s and publisher’s own statements, as reported in the press. Sales figures are unaudited.