Matt Dinniman is the anarchic architect behind Dungeon Crawler Carl, a series that’s catapulted into quite the cult phenomenon — selling more than six million copies and spawning plans for a television adaptation, graphic novels, audio programmes, a card game and even a tabletop role-playing game. Fans can’t seem to get enough of its gleefully unhinged mash-up of madcap satire, wildly inventive dungeon carnage and RPG mechanics — a saga so compulsively readable that finishing one instalment makes the next impossible to resist.
His new standalone novel, Operation Bounce House, shifts the action to the colony planet of New Sonora, where Oliver Lewis is simply trying to live a quiet life — running the family ranch, jamming with his band and keeping the ageing fleet of intelligent farm bots in working order. But when Earth finally opens instant travel and communication with the colony, things quickly spiral out of control. The mega-corporation Apex arrives with what it calls an “eviction action”, and suddenly the entire planet becomes a high-stakes playground. Gamers back on Earth are invited to design and pilot war machines from the comfort of their living rooms, while Oliver is left defending his home with little more than his grandfather’s old book and a bucket of rusty parts.
To celebrate the book’s release, CinemaChords sat down with Dinniman to discuss stepping beyond the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl into an entirely new universe, the collision between personal conviction and a world that refuses to bend to it, and the increasingly blurred line between human control and AI autonomy — all of which make Operation Bounce House as much a rollicking sci‑fi saga as it is a disquieting dystopian satire of present-day disarray.
All details of Matt Dinniman’s releases and tours can be found on his official website HERE.
