Welcome to Night Vale (Fink) - Book Reviews

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