Welcome to Night Vale
Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor 2016
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062351425
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Joseph Fink created and co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and touring live show. In his mid-twenties he started Commonplace Books, a very small publishing company, producing two collections of short works which he edited and laid out at his office job when his boss wasn't looking.
Later Jeffrey approached Joseph with the idea of writing a play about time travel. They co-wrote and performed this play in the East Village in August of 2011. Soon afterwards, Joseph started brainstorming a new project he and Jeffrey could co-write and this led to the pilot episode of Welcome to Night Vale. He is from California but doesn't live there anymore. (He live in Brooklyn, New York City.)
Jeffrey Cranor co-writes—along with Joseph Fink—the hit podcast and touring live show Welcome to Night Vale. He also makes theater and dance. He has written more than 100 short plays with the New York Neo-Futurists, co-wrote and co-performed a two-man show (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us) with Joseph, and collaborated with choreographer (also wife) Jillian Sweeney to create three full-length dance pieces: Imaginary Lines, This could be it, and Vulture-Wally. Jeffrey lives in New York State. (Author bios from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The book is charming and absurd—think This American Life meets Alice in Wonderland.
Washington Post
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.
Guardian (UK)
Fink and Cranor’s prose hints there’s an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations.... [T]he book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town’s intersection with an unsuspecting real world.
Los Angeles Times
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
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
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
This 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
Though the book meanders a bit in the middle, the end is satisfying, with a surprising origin story for one of the characters.... This unusual experiment in format-shifting works surprisingly well.
Publishers Weekly
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. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) It's all pretty far out there on the weird-ometer, but the novel is definitely as addictive as its source material.... A delightfully bonkers media crossover that will make an incredible audiobook
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Questions have not yet been issued by the publisher... so use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Welcome to Night Vale...then take off on your own:
1. These are are the choices—take your pick: This American Life meets Alice in Wonderland ... or Twiight Zone meets Twin Peaks ... or Neil Gaiman/Stephen King meets Lake Woebegon. Seriously. How would you describe Night Vale. (Have some fun.)
2. Since you've chosen to read this book, very likely you're already a fan of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. How does the novel stack up against the audio show? If you haven't listened to the podcast series (you haven't?... Seriously...?), did you feel like a small ball in tall weeds, utterly lost? Or did you find the novel easy to follow?
3. In their podcast, and now in their novel, Fink and Cranor have created a self-contained world all unto itself. Describe that world—its weirdness, even scariness, its humor and downright absurdity. What made you laugh out loud: the toxic librarians, maybe...or the local paper editor who hatchets bloggers?
4. The writing about Danny is particulary charming. Danny is a shape-shifter; how does that trait play into adolescence angst when it comes to self-identity, attractiveness, and likeability?
5. What about Jackie and Diane? Are they well-developed as characters? Do you develop sympathy Talk about them individually and as a duo when the two decide, grudgingly, to work together.
6. And then there's Cecil and his radio show. Both Diane and Jackie find comfort in his radio show. How does he move the plot along? And as you discuss this, do not—absolutely do not—mention (or touch) the flamingos.
7. Were you surprised (creeped out?) toward the end of the book with its revelations about the nature of the town and its residents?
8. Talk about the ways in which Welcome to Night Vale uses—and satirizes—cosmic horror. Here's a good description of the genre, perfected by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), from an article in the UK's Guardian:
Alien horrors break through the thin delusion we call human perception with nasty results.... Cosmic horror is the realm not only of the unspoken, but the unspeakable; not only the invisible, but that which we refuse to see. It works by drawing out our unspoken anxieties and giving them monstrous form.
(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks..)