Welcome to Night Vale

Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
Completed 8/12/2021, Reviewed 8/12/2021
4 stars

This was one strange book.  Surreal.  Kafkaesque.  And wildly entertaining.  It’s based on a podcast about a desert town with very strange residents and happenings.  I’ve never listened to it. This book was recommended by a friend (thanks Will!).  There are two more books in the trilogy which I picked up cheap.  It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award in the Horror category, though it’s only mildly horror in that there’s at least one ghost.  It’s going to be hard to talk about this book because it is so weird, but I’ll give a go.

Night Vale is a town in the desert southwest.  There are all sorts of strange beings, like the faceless woman, angels named Erika, lights in the sky above Arby’s, Lovecraftian monster librarians, microphones in every home, not-so-secret police, and government agents on surveillance of basically everybody.  One resident, Jackie, has been nineteen for a very long time, perhaps decades.  She runs a pawn shop where she gives everyone eleven dollars for what they pawn.  One day, a man in a tan suit with a deer skin suitcase comes in and gives her a slip of paper with the words “King City” on it.  She can’t remember the name of the man, nor what he looks like.  The slip of paper is always returns to her hand no matter what she does with it.  She becomes obsessed with finding the tan suit man and slowly, her life unravels.

Another resident, Diane, has a son named Josh who is a shapeshifter.  He can turn into anything.  Diane starts to see Josh’s father around town after fifteen years away.  She tries to confront him, but he always runs away.  In the meantime, one of her coworkers, Eric, has disappeared and he seems to be linked with the tan suit man.  Diane becomes obsessed with finding Eric and her son’s father who seems to be linked to King City.  Soon she is on a collision course with the gruff Jackie, their only resolution being working together to find King City.

The plot, the crazy details of Night Vale, and the prose are what make this book so good.  I found myself driven to reading this just to see how every detail was going to be described, like the crow that’s maybe a dog but is really a crow that’s a dog.  Or the diner waitress with branches growing out of her.  Or Josh, who one day has tentacles, the next day wings.  It’s just wacky.  I didn’t find it necessarily ha-ha funny, but it’s very amusing and entertaining.  And the novelty of the weirdness lasts the whole book.  I didn’t become tired of it because I always wanted to see what came next.  Suffice it to say, the world-building is pretty phenomenal.

There’s actually decent characterization as well.  Diane is a struggling single mom who tries, not always successfully, to connect with her son.  When she begins seeing her son’s father around town, always doing different jobs, her life slowly unravels.  It doesn’t help that she’s also obsessed with the disappearance of Eric at work, who no one else in the office seems to remember.  And Jackie is also well developed.  Perpetually nineteen, she struggles with having her childhood friends growing old around her.  She has a wonderfully uncomfortable meeting with her mom in a house she can’t remember growing up in, not even remembering that the silverware drawer is really the hot milk drawer.

The relationship between the Jackie and Diane develops complexly, with both being irritated at each other for getting in each other’s way with their similar obsessions.  But very slowly and deliberately, they come together to try to find a way to the mysterious King City.

It will be interesting to see how the world of Night Vale holds up in subsequent books.  The novelty may wear off as time goes on.  However, I think the fact that this podcast has been going on for a long time means that the authors have continued to come up with a lot of creative ideas, so I’m hoping the next two books are just as good.  I give this one four stars out of five.