Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel

From the creators of the #1 international hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves . . . no matter where we live.\n\nWelcome to Night Vale . . . a friendly desert community somewhere in the American Southwest. In this ordinary little town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are commonplace parts of everyday life, the lives of two women, with two mysteries, are about to converge.\n\nPawnshop proprietor Jackie Fierro abides by routine. But a crack appears in the standard order of her perpetually nineteen-year-old life when a mysterious man in a tan jacket gives her a slip of paper marked by two pencil-smudged words: KING CITY. Everything about the man unsettles her, especially the paper that she cannot remove from her hand. Yet when Jackie puts her life on hold to search for the man, no one who meets him can seem to remember anything about him.\n\nDiane Crayton's fifteen-year-old son, Josh, is moody and a shape-shifter. Lately, Diane has started to see the boy's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as he did the day he left when they were teenagers. Josh is growing ever more curious about his estranged father-leading to a disaster Diane can see coming but is helpless to prevent.\n\nDiane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search to reclaim her routine life draw them increasingly closer to each other, and to this place that may hold the key to their mysteries and their futures . . . if they can ever find it.\n\nEditorial Reviews\n\nThis is a splendid, weird, moving novel...It manages beautifully that trick of embracing the surreal in order to underscore and emphasize the real - not as allegory, but as affirmation of emotional truths that don't conform to the neat and tidy boxes in which we're encouraged to house them." - NPR.org\n\n""The book is charming and absurd - think "This American Life" meets "Alice in Wonderland." - Washington Post\n\n"Longtime listeners and newcomers alike are likely to appreciate the ways in which Night Vale, as Fink puts it, "treats the absurd as normal and treats the normal as absurd." What they might not foresee is the emotional wallop the novel delivers in its climactic chapters." - Austin Chronicle\n\n"The hit podcast is absurd and hilarious, and as a book it's similarly entertaining..." - The Guardian\n\n"Fink and Cranor's prose hints there's an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations. . . . the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world." - Los Angeles Times\n\n"Welcome to Night Vale lives up to the podcast hype in every way. It is a singularly inventive visit to an otherworldly town that's the stuff of nightmares and daydreams." - BookPage\n\n"As a companion piece, "Welcome to Night Vale" will be hard to resist. Though the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world, its mysteries - like the richest conspiracy theories - don't exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape." - Detroit Free Press\n\n"The charms of ‘Welcome to Night Vale' are nearly impossible to quantify. That applies to the podcast, structured as community radio dispatches from a particularly surreal desert town, as well as this novel, written by the podcast's co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor." - Minneapolis Star Tribune\n\n"This is the novel of your dreams. . . . A story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys and spring-loaded trap doors of the small town home you'll realize you've always missed living in. When it says ‘welcome,' it's mandatory. You belong here." - Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside\n\n"Welcome To Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to to vivid life. . . . It is as weird and surreal as I hoped it would be, and a surprisingly existential meditation on the nature of time, reality, and the glow cloud that watches over us." - Wil Wheaton\n\n"Take Conan's Hyborea, teleport it to the American Southwest, dress all the warriors in business casual and hide their swords under the floorboards - that's Night Vale: absurd, magical, wholly engrossing, and always harboring some hidden menace." - John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van\n\n"Brilliant, hilarious, and wondrously strange. I'm packing up and moving to Night Vale!" - Ransom Riggs, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children\n\n"This small town full of hooded figures, glowing clouds, cryptically terrifying public policies, and flickering realities quickly feels more like home than home. . . . There is nothing like Night Vale, in the best possible way." - Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Name of the Star\n\n"They've done the unthinkable: merged the high weirdness and intense drama of Night Vale to the pages of a novel that is even weirder, even more intense than the podcast." - Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and co-editor of Boing Boing\n\n"Emotionally compelling and superbly realized. This seductive, hilarious book unfolds at the moment when certain quiet responsible people find they must risk everything on behalf of love, hope, and understanding. Not a single person who reads this book will be disappointed." - Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution and Vacation\n\n"As a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have delighted me with stories that are clever, twisted, beautiful, strange, wonderful, and sweet. This book does all of that and more. I think this might be the best book I've read in years." - Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind\n\n"Co-creators of the popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast, successfully expand the mythology of their strange desert town. Fans will find it refreshing to see Night Vale from different perspectives . . . but knowledge of the podcast isn't required to follow the story." - Publishers Weekly\n\n"All hail the glow cloud as the weird and wonderful town of Night Vale brings itself to fine literature. . . . A fantastic addition with a stand-alone tale of the mysterious desert town that also offers loyal listeners some interesting clues about the nature of the place." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\n\n"In their novelistic adaptation of the eerie yet comic landscape of Night Vale, Fink and Cranor have managed to create an excellent stand-alone book perfect for newcomers while also including plenty of winks to longtime fans..." - Shelf Awareness\n\n"As enjoyable and eerie as the podcast" - Paste Magazine\n\n"A marvelous book.... Like the podcast, the novel is full of people we love and root for, full of frightening things, and full of dramatic tension that pays off beautifully with resolutions worthy of any great tale of traditional conflict." - boingboing.com\n\n"A wonderfully creepy tale filled with revelations about the nature of the town and its residents." - AV Club\n\n"Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel masterfully brings the darkly hilarious, touching and creepy world of the podcast into the realm of ink and paper." - Asbury Park Press\n\n"Fast moving and sturdily written...an excellent introduction to a town everyone should get the chance to explore." - Daily Californian\n\n"This is the kind of book that'll make you say ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD. Whether you're a fan of the strange and upsetting Welcome to Night Vale podcast or you're new to Night Vale and its quaint desert conspiracies, it's never a bad time to visit Night Vale. " - Bustle\n\n"Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel is easily enjoyed on its own terms - even for those who are new to the town of Night Vale - largely because the storytelling shines so brightly on the level of its individual parts." - Vox\n- From the Publisher\n\nWelcome to Night Vale: A Novel is easily enjoyed on its own terms - even for those who are new to the town of Night Vale - largely because the storytelling shines so brightly on the level of its individual parts.\n- Vox\n\nThis is the kind of book that'll make you say ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD. Whether you're a fan of the strange and upsetting Welcome to Night Vale podcast or you're new to Night Vale and its quaint desert conspiracies, it's never a bad time to visit Night Vale. \n- Bustle\n\nFast moving and sturdily written...an excellent introduction to a town everyone should get the chance to explore.\n- Daily Californian\n\n'Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel' masterfully brings the darkly hilarious, touching and creepy world of the podcast into the realm of ink and paper.\n- Asbury Park Press\n\nA wonderfully creepy tale filled with revelations about the nature of the town and its residents.\n- AV Club\n\nA marvelous book.... Like the podcast, the novel is full of people we love and root for, full of frightening things, and full of dramatic tension that pays off beautifully with resolutions worthy of any great tale of traditional conflict.\n- boingboing.com\n\nAs enjoyable and eerie as the podcast\n- Paste Magazine\n\nIn their novelistic adaptation of the eerie yet comic landscape of Night Vale, Fink and Cranor have managed to create an excellent stand-alone book perfect for newcomers while also including plenty of winks to longtime fans...\n- Shelf Awareness\n\nAs a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have delighted me with stories that are clever, twisted, beautiful, strange, wonderful, and sweet. This book does all of that and more. I think this might be the best book I've read in years.\n- Patrick Rothfuss\n\nEmotionally compelling and superbly realized. This seductive, hilarious book unfolds at the moment when certain quiet responsible people find they must risk everything on behalf of love, hope, and understanding. Not a single person who reads this book will be disappointed.\n- Deb Olin Unferth\n\nThey've done the unthinkable: merged the high weirdness and intense drama of Night Vale to the pages of a novel that is even weirder, even more intense than the podcast.\n- Cory Doctorow\n\nThis small town full of hooded figures, glowing clouds, cryptically terrifying public policies, and flickering realities quickly feels more like home than home. . . . There is nothing like Night Vale, in the best possible way.\n- Maureen Johnson\n\nBrilliant, hilarious, and wondrously strange. I'm packing up and moving to Night Vale!\n- Ransom Riggs\n\nTake Conan's Hyborea, teleport it to the American Southwest, dress all the warriors in business casual and hide their swords under the floorboards -- that's Night Vale: absurd, magical, wholly engrossing, and always harboring some hidden menace.\n- John Darnielle\n\nWelcome To Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to to vivid life. . . . It is as weird and surreal as I hoped it would be, and a surprisingly existential meditation on the nature of time, reality, and the glow cloud that watches over us.\n- Wil Wheaton\n\nThis is the novel of your dreams. . . . A story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys and spring-loaded trap doors of the small town home you'll realize you've always missed living in. When it says ‘welcome,' it's mandatory. You belong here.\n- Glen David Gold\n\nThe charms of ‘Welcome to Night Vale' are nearly impossible to quantify. That applies to the podcast, structured as community radio dispatches from a particularly surreal desert town, as well as this novel, written by the podcast's co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.\n- Minneapolis Star Tribune\n\nAs a companion piece, "Welcome to Night Vale" will be hard to resist. Though the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world, its mysteries - like the richest conspiracy theories - don't exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape.\n- Detroit Free Press\n\nWelcome to Night Vale lives up to the podcast hype in every way. It is a singularly inventive visit to an otherworldly town that's the stuff of nightmares and daydreams.\n- BookPage\n\nFink and Cranor's prose hints there's an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations. . . . the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world.\n- Los Angeles Times\n\nThe hit podcast is absurd and hilarious, and as a book it's similarly entertaining...\n- The Guardian\n\nLongtime listeners and newcomers alike are likely to appreciate the ways in which Night Vale, as Fink puts it, "treats the absurd as normal and treats the normal as absurd." What they might not foresee is the emotional wallop the novel delivers in its climactic chapters.\n- Austin Chronicle\n\n"The book is charming and absurd - think "This American Life" meets "Alice in Wonderland.\n- Washington Post\n\nThis is a splendid, weird, moving novel...It manages beautifully that trick of embracing the surreal in order to underscore and emphasize the real - not as allegory, but as affirmation of emotional truths that don't conform to the neat and tidy boxes in which we're encouraged to house them.\n- NPR.org\n\n"The book is charming and absurd - think "This American Life" meets "Alice in Wonderland.\n- Washington Post\n\n04/27/2015\nFink and Cranor, co-creators of the popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast, successfully expand the mythology of their strange desert town. The novel follows Diane Crayton, whose shapeshifting son's absentee father has just come back to town, and Jackie Fierro, who's been the 19-year-old proprietor of Night Vale's pawnshop for the last several decades. After peculiar, half-remembered encounters with a man in a tan jacket, both women keep coming back to the same phrase: King City. Diane and Jackie have to work together to peel back the mysteries surrounding King City while trying to protect their loved ones. Though the book meanders a bit in the middle, the end is satisfying, with a surprising origin story for one of the characters. Fans will find it refreshing to see Night Vale from different perspectives and to meet characters who have only been mentioned before in passing, but knowledge of the podcast isn't required to follow the story. This unusual experiment in format-shifting works surprisingly well. (Oct.)\n- Publishers Weekly\n\n09/01/2015\n"Welcome to Night Vale" is a popular podcast of public radio broadcasts presumably from the fictional town of Night Vale, a uniquely surreal place isolated in the desert. Inspired by the podcasts, this first novel from creator/writer Fink and writer Cranor focuses on a few residents: pawn shop owner Jackie, who has been 19 for many decades, and Diane, an office drone and PTA member whose son, Jack, constantly changes his physical form. At the pawn shop, a strange man in a tan jacket sells Jackie a piece of paper with the words KING CITY written on it. She tries to destroy the paper, but no matter what she does, she's always holding it. Meanwhile, one of Diane's coworkers vanishes and everyone else denies his existence. These mysteries converge as Jackie and Diane begin a quest to discover the secret of the man and his indestructible paper, which might even lead to their venturing out of Night Vale. Their journey eventually takes them to the library, considered the most dangerous place in town--its librarians have toxic blood. VERDICT Fans of the podcast will enjoy learning more Night Vale lore, and fantasy readers may also enjoy, depending on how tolerant they are of non sequiturs. Others, though, may not find enough to sustain a novel of this length. [See Editors' Picks, p. 28; Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA\n- Library Journal\n\nAudio is THE way to experience the Night Vale novel. What would the adventures of Night Vale and its citizens be if not told to us by intrepid community radio host Cecil Palmer? Cecil, played by Cecil Baldwin, is the voice of the wildly popular "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast, of which the novel is an offspring. Baldwin does double duty here, narrating the main text as well as interludes of the radio show that occur within it, in which there are also brief cameos by some additional voices. Baldwin's deep, rich voice is always attuned to the weirdness that abounds in this small desert town. Ultimately, the shorter, self-contained podcast episodes are more successful than the sprawling novel, but it's fun to dive more deeply into the Night Vale universe. For fans, it's a must-listen. J.M.D. 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine\n- OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile\n\nAudio is THE way to experience the Night Vale novel. What would the adventures of Night Vale and its citizens be if not told to us by intrepid community radio host Cecil Palmer? Cecil, played by Cecil Baldwin, is the voice of the wildly popular "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast, of which the novel is an offspring. Baldwin does double duty here, narrating the main text as well as interludes of the radio show that occur within it, in which there are also brief cameos by some additional voices. Baldwin's deep, rich voice is always attuned to the weirdness that abounds in this small desert town. Ultimately, the shorter, self-contained podcast episodes are more successful than the sprawling novel, but it's fun to dive more deeply into the Night Vale universe. For fans, it's a must-listen. J.M.D. 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine\n- OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile\n\n*2015-07-29\nAll hail the glow cloud as the weird and wonderful town of Night Vale brings itself to fine literature. Creators Fink and Cranor offer fans of their (oc)cult podcast Welcome to Night Vale a fantastic addition with a stand-alone tale of the mysterious desert town that also offers loyal listeners some interesting clues about the nature of the place. Readers who are unfamiliar with the podcast shouldn't be put off--they still get an eccentric thriller with a specific sense of humor that mimics the omnipresent spookiness of Twin Peaks. Artist Kate Leth, who collaborates on the podcast, once described the project this way: "It's like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman started building a town in The Sims and then just...left it running. For years." Fortunately, the writers are firmly confident in their creation. "Look, life is stressful," the book tells us. "This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life." The main plot largely centers on two characters and their search for a hidden city. Perpetually 19-year-old Jackie Fierro runs the local pawn shop and is perplexed when A Man in a Tan Jacket gives her a note reading simply "King City." Meanwhile, PTA mom Diane Crayton loses her teenage son and must join forces with Jackie to find this mysterious place. It's all pretty far out there on the weird-ometer, but the novel is definitely as addictive as its source material. The book also pays fan service by punctuating its chapters with original broadcasts by Night Vale narrator Cecil Gershwin Palmer and cameos by fan favorites like Old Woman Josie, Carlos the sexy scientist, and the aforementioned Glow Cloud. A delightfully bonkers media crossover that will make an incredible audiobook.\n\n- Kirkus Reviews