Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel

Joseph Fink · Jeffrey Cranor

Oct 2015 · HarperAudio · Narrated by Cecil Baldwin, Dylan Marron, Retta, Therese Plummer, and Dan Bittner

About this audiobook

?New York Times Bestseller

""Hypnotic and darkly funny. . . . Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in."" —The Guardian

“A splendid, weird, moving novel.”— NPR.org

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast 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.

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked ""KING CITY"" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.

Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton's son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane's started to see her son's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.

Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: ""KING CITY"". It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures...if they can ever find it.

Ratings and reviews

I came in blindly, not knowing anything about the podcasts or Night Vale. I read the reviews on Goodreads and expected the story to be weird, which caught my attention. I was not expecting this hard to follow storyline, and I say hard to follow because I lost interest so quickly. For me it was a waste of my money, but it's a good thing I got it on sale. Don't make the same mistake.

Moments of absurdity, genuine emotion, and surreal horror intertwine to take us on a genre-less stroll through towns both quirky and strange. While not as good as its sequels, "It Devours" and "The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home," the likable characters, kooky tangents, mundane mentions of truly terrifying entities (a vague yet menacing government agency, the aforementioned faceless old woman), and of course the warm voice of Cecil make Night Vale lovable and intriguing.

I'm sorry but I couldn't finish this. I've been a long time listener of the podcast so I'm very familiar with this form of story telling. My problem is that so much of this weirdness for weirdness sake just doesn't work for me in a novel format.

About the author

Joseph Fink is the creator of the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn't Dead podcasts, and the New York Times bestselling author of Welcome to Night Vale, It Devours!, and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home (all written with Jeffrey Cranor), and Alice Isn’t Dead. He is also the author of the middle-grade novel, The Halloween Moon. He and his wife, Meg Bashwiner, have written the memoir The First Ten Years. They live together in the Hudson River Valley.

Jeffrey Cranor cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also cocreates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York.

Cecil Baldwin is the narrator of the Welcome To Night Vale podcast and has been featured on podcasts such as Ask Me Another, Selected Shorts, Shipwreck, Big Data and Our Fair City. He lives in New York.