How to Read All 8 ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Books in Order: Carl and Princess Donut’s Wild Journey Through the Dungeon
Follow Carl and Donut from their first deadly floor to Book 8—and see how their universe keeps growing
Key Takeaways
- The Dungeon Crawler Carl books should be read in order from Book 1 through Book 8.
- Carl and Donut’s journey grows from dungeon survival into an intergalactic conflict.
- Book 9 is already underway as DCC continues to grow, the last adventure likely to be two books.
It would be hard to imagine a more inauspicious beginning than a guy, dressed in his boxer shorts and accompanied by his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning cat, doing his best not to die. But eight books later, Dungeon Crawler Carl has become something much larger than author Matt Dinniman or anyone else could have ever imagined.
Dinniman’s wildly inventive LitRPG book series follows Coast Guard veteran Carl and Princess Donut after aliens effectively repossess Earth, destroying its man-made structures and forcing the survivors underground. There, they discover that humanity’s catastrophe has been transformed into entertainment into the form of an enormous, deadly dungeon crawl being broadcast to viewers throughout the galaxy. To survive, Carl and Donut have to battle monsters, complete quests, gain skills and descend from floor to floor—all while remembering that keeping an audience entertained can be nearly as important as staying alive.
That’s the wonderfully absurd premise, anyway. But what makes Dungeon Crawler Carl increasingly compelling is how much the story evolves from a violent (albeit funny) survival adventure into a story about friendship, loyalty, exploitation, resistance and a much larger universe operating outside the dungeon.
And if you’re wondering about the best way to read the Dungeon Crawler Carl books (and why wouldn’t you be?), this is one series where the answer couldn’t be simpler: start at the beginning and keep going. Each novel continues Carl and Donut’s journey, introducing new dungeon floors and challenges while building upon characters, relationships and mysteries established in earlier books.
Here’s how to read all eight Dungeon Crawler Carl books in order—and how the story gets bigger along the way.
1. ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ (2020)
Dungeon levels: Floors 1 and 2
What it’s about: Welcome to the apocalypse. Carl is outside in the middle of the night, wearing little more than a leather jacket and boxer shorts, trying to retrieve Princess Donut when every man-made structure on Earth suddenly collapses. The survivors are invited aka forced) to enter an enormous underground dungeon operated as an intergalactic reality show.
Carl and Donut begin as complete novices, learning alongside the reader how this bizarre new existence works. There are achievements, loot boxes, safe rooms, monsters, bosses and increasingly ridiculous challenges. Donut, meanwhile, is transformed from an ordinary prize-winning Persian cat into an intelligent, talking (and extremely opinionated) participant.
The dungeon’s system AI takes an immediate and rather disturbing interest in Carl, while game guide Mordecai helps the pair understand enough of the rules to have a chance of surviving. But those rules come with a catch: the crawlers are not only expected to live, but to entertain as well.
How the story gets bigger: Book 1 establishes the idea that will drive much of what follows. More than just being satisfied with surviving whatever the dungeon throws at him, he quickly realizes that the people running the game have rules of their own and those rules can potentially be manipulated. Most importantly, Dinniman establishes the relationship at the heart of the series: the story of Carl and Donut, and what each is prepared to do to keep the other alive.
2. ‘Carl’s Doomsday Scenario’ (2021)
Dungeon level: Floor 3
What it’s about: Surviving the first two floors just means that Carl and Donut have earned the opportunity to face something worse. And the third floor introduces another important stage in their development as crawlers: choosing races and classes that will help define their abilities going forward. Carl becomes a Primal and takes the Compensated Anarchist class, which is almost suspiciously appropriate for someone becoming increasingly interested in turning the dungeon’s own systems against it. The challenges are becoming more complicated as well. New allies and enemies emerge, Carl and Donut’s fame continues to grow, and their actions are being watched by an enormous audience that can affect their fortunes.
How the story gets bigger: Dinniman begins widening our view beyond the dungeon itself. Carl and Donut are no longer anonymous contestants, instead becoming celebrities within the game, which gives them influence but also makes them targets.
The dungeon’s elaborate rules, sponsors, outside viewers and entertainment machinery become increasingly important, with Carl starting to understand that there’s another game being played beyond simply reaching the next stairwell.
3. ‘The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook’ (2021)
Dungeon level: Floor 4 — the Iron Tangle
What it’s about: If you think navigating public transportation can be frustrating, welcome to the Iron Tangle, an enormous interconnected railway system in which trains, stations and tracks form a seemingly impossible puzzle. Up and down don’t necessarily mean what they should, destinations aren’t where they seem to be and the trains themselves can be deadly. Carl and Donut increasingly have to work with other crawlers if anyone is going to figure out how the floor operates.
But the title points to the development that matters most as Carl comes into possession of the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, a secret repository of information left behind by crawlers from previous seasons.
How the story gets bigger: The Cookbook changes Carl’s understanding of his situation as he’s discovering that others came before him who also recognized what the game really was and tried to fight back. At this point, survival is beginning to look a lot more like resistance.
4. ‘The Gate of the Feral Gods’ (2021)
Dungeon level: Floor 5
What it’s about: Carl and Donut encounter an assortment of bizarre environments and challenges that include a floating fortress populated by warrior gnomes, a sand castle, an abandoned submarine and a haunted crypt. The floor is divided into unusual interconnected areas, while Carl’s increasing willingness to experiment with the game’s mechanics creates complications that extend far beyond whatever challenge happens to be directly in front of him.
The mythology surrounding the dungeon also continues to expand, with gods and other powerful figures becoming more significant and Carl assuming greater responsibility for people beyond his immediate circle.
How the story gets bigger: Carl is becoming a leader, quite a contrast to simply keeping himself and Donut alive. Now his decisions can affect large numbers of other crawlers. At the same time, the dungeon is becoming more than an endless collection of random monsters and video-game challenges. There’s a history and mythology behind what Carl and Donut are experiencing, and almost nothing about Dungeon Crawler World is as simple as it initially appears.
5. ‘The Butcher’s Masquerade’ (2022)
Dungeon level: Floor 6 — the Hunting Grounds
What it’s about: For the first time, wealthy alien tourists can enter the dungeon and hunt crawlers themselves. These hunters expect the humans to be prey, although Carl and his fellow crawlers have other ideas.
Among those pursuing them is veteran hunter Vrah, who’s looking for the greatest trophy of her career. But after five floors of monsters, traps and manipulation, Carl and Donut have become considerably more dangerous than the outsiders realize.
The Butcher’s Masquerade itself brings together many of the characters and storylines that have accumulated throughout the series, making this feel much less like the adventures of two isolated survivors and much more like the story of a community.
How the story gets bigger: The crawlers aren’t content to remain victims in someone else’s game. They’re learning to cooperate, and Carl’s ability to turn the dungeon’s rules against the people exploiting them becomes increasingly important. There’s also much more happening outside the dungeon at this point. Carl’s actions have political repercussions, and the people watching across the galaxy aren’t all rooting for the same outcome. As a result, the guy who entered the dungeon in his underwear is becoming a problem for some very powerful people.
6. ‘The Eye of the Bedlam Bride’ (2023)
Dungeon level: Floor 8
What it’s about: Picking up immediately after the events surrounding the seventh floor, Carl and Donut arrive on Floor 8, where Dinniman once again demonstrates that readers should never assume they know what the next dungeon level will look like.
This time, the major challenge revolves around a card-based combat system. Crawlers must capture monsters and turn them into cards that can be summoned during battles and the stronger and stranger the monster, the more potentially valuable the card. That makes the hunt for Shi Maria, the terrifying Bedlam Bride, especially important. At the same time, relationships established across the previous books are becoming increasingly complicated; the dungeon’s artificial intelligence is behaving in more troubling ways and preparations are underway for something readers have heard about for a long time: the ninth floor’s Faction Wars.
How the story gets bigger: By now, DCC is operating simultaneously on several levels in the sense that there’s the immediate challenge of surviving the floor, Carl’s growing campaign against the system, conflicts involving characters we’ve come to care about over thousands of pages and forces outside the dungeon whose interests increasingly collide with what’s happening inside. Even the AI, which was once primarily a source of bizarre announcements, achievements and a certain fixation involving Carl’s feet, is becoming something far more consequential. And everything is pointing toward war.
7. ‘This Inevitable Ruin’ (2025)
Dungeon level: Floor 9 — Faction Wars
What it’s about: Faction Wars have been looming over the series for a number of books and now they’ve arrived. Nine armies enter the ninth floor, where powerful outside factions have traditionally competed against one another. But this time the game has changed in the sense that the crawlers have an army of their own, while self-aware NPCs form another unprecedented faction and at the center of the battlefield is a castle everyone wants to capture and hold.
Carl and Donut have come an almost unimaginable distance from the frightened newcomers who entered the first floor, with their accumulated alliances, reputations and enemies now having consequences, as do decisions and relationships stretching back across the series.
How the story gets bigger: Faction Wars demonstrate just how thoroughly Carl has changed his place within the game. More than attempting to survive the system, he’s actively interfering with the plans of the people who have traditionally controlled it. And this time the crawlers aren’t simply individuals trying to reach the next floor, but rather a force capable of taking the fight directly to the factions that have treated their suffering as entertainment.
8. ‘A Parade of Horribles’ (2026)
Dungeon level: Floor 10
What it’s about: After the massive conflict of Faction Wars, Carl and Donut reach the 10th floor and initially encounter something almost suspiciously straightforward in the form of racing; getting from point A to point B without finishing last. Your vehicle has to be upgraded following each race before facing a more difficult course.
Par for the “course,” nothing in Dungeon Crawler Carl stays simple for long. Glitches are occurring with increasing frequency, the system AI is becoming more unpredictable and rumors are spreading about something happening on the mysterious 11th floor. Even the people running the crawl don’t seem to understand exactly what’s waiting there, although the AI does refer to it as “A Parade of Horribles.”
Meanwhile, Carl is once again working on a plan, this one so dangerous that he can’t even discuss it with his friends for fear that the AI will discover what he’s doing.
How the story gets bigger: Published May 12, 2026, A Parade of Horribles is the eighth and newest DCC novel, and by this stage the premise has traveled an extraordinary distance from Book 1. The dungeon itself is becoming unstable, Carl’s actions can have consequences well beyond the surviving crawlers and the people supposedly controlling the game no longer appear to have complete control over what they’ve created.
Book 9 and ‘The Beautiful Place’
Eight books into Dungeon Crawler Carl, Dinniman is already at work on what promises to be Carl and Donut’s biggest adventure yet—and, apparently, their last. The ninth and final story currently carries the working title The Beautiful Place, although he has cautioned that the name isn’t necessarily permanent. He posted its prologue for Patreon supporters in June 2026 and has since begun sharing additional chapters as he continues writing the novel.
And readers shouldn’t expect a small finale. Book 9 has become large enough that Dinniman plans for the concluding story to appear as two physical volumes. That means Dungeon Crawler Carl will remain a nine-book story in terms of Dinniman’s conception of the series, while ultimately occupying 10 volumes on readers’ shelves.
Do you need to read the ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ books in order?
Absolutely. Unlike some fantasy series where individual adventures can stand relatively independently, Dungeon Crawler Carl tells one continuing story. Characters introduced several books earlier return, relationships evolve, objects and abilities that once seemed relatively minor become important, Carl’s understanding of the dungeon develops gradually and plans can take several books to come to fruition.
Even more importantly, much of the satisfaction comes from watching Carl and Donut change. Carl progresses from a guy desperately improvising his way through an impossible situation to someone capable of anticipating—and deliberately disrupting—the plans of those running the game; Donut undergoes her own transformation from Carl’s ex-girlfriend’s pampered show cat into his indispensable partner and a formidable figure in her own right. So although the individual books have distinctive floors and challenges, publication order is reading order.
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