“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.”
These are the words that launched the now internationally popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale back in 2012. They also remain perhaps the most concise way to communicate the style and premise of the podcast, which takes the form of a radio show for the fictional town of Night Vale. The podcast is absurd, sometimes unsettling and often beautiful.
Just a few months ago, the creators of the podcast released a novel that hit the Amazon bestseller list instantly. Although set in the same town as the podcast and featuring many of the same characters, the novel is an original, self-contained story, and so it is not necessary to be familiar with the podcast in order to understand the novel. Readers follow the narration of Diane Crayton, a single mother trying to learn how to connect with her shape-shifting son Josh, and Jackie Fiero, a pawn shop owner who is given a piece of paper she subsequently cannot get rid of that reads simply, “KING CITY.” Brought together by their search for a mysterious man in a tan jacket, Diane and Jackie find themselves allies as they try to hold onto their lives in a world that is making even less sense than usual.
Night Vale, both the podcast and the novel, has a peculiar style that may not bode well for everyone. Reminiscent of magical realism, it inverts and confuses reality without acknowledging what is happening is strange. For instance, there is no explanation for why Josh can shape-shift; he simply can, and no one questions the fact that Diane’s son may be a horsefly one day and a sentient patch of haze the next. There are long forays into description, painting the picture of the town and its inhabitantants in an extraordinariily beautiful manner. The town itself, in all its weirdness, is just as important as any of the main characters.
For all of the bizarre changes in reality that make up Welcome to Night Vale, its greatest strength lies in its ability to take the strange and use it to comment on real, relatable situations. In particular, the relationship between Diane and Josh is remarkably conveyed, with the strain of single parenthood and the struggles of communication between the mother and the teenage boy evident in every line. Of course, in the real world, teenage boys are not literal shape-shifters, but there is fickleness and uncertainty, a slipperiness of identity in puberty that we have all experienced. Diane’s every action is more than understandable as a mother who no longer knows how to relate to her son, a problem perhaps augmented by the fact that he does not always have a human form.
One reason behind the podcast’s popularity is its positive representation of various minority groups, especially the LGBTQ community. This is present in the novel as well. Both Diane, a working single mother, and Jackie, a young and independent business owner, stand out as people who do not often get to be protagonists. Fink and Cranor’s exceptional thoughtfulness when it comes to these portrayals is a positive mark for the novel for several reasons. Besides obvious benefits for people who belong to those minorities, working outside stereotypical characters allows for fresh and more surprising stories. The story in the novel is unpredictable not only because the rules of reality are different, but also because this is not a story that has been told a hundred times before. The characters are strongly individual, refusing to blend in with other books or movies. Their personalities are distinct and developed, and every decision they make is logical from what we know about them.
It is difficult to get an accurate impression of Welcome to Night Vale without actually reading it yourself. Descriptions get lost in trying to convey the strangeness without truly communicating the allure of the enchanting language and unexpectedly touching story. Even once you start reading, you might be too confused trying to understand what is happening to decide whether you actually like the book or not – and between the fantastical element and its peculiar style, there are certainly people who will not like the book. For others, it will be a favorite for years to come. Welcome to Night Vale will take you on a journey into a desert town, surprise you, move you and leave you dazzled by the mysterious lights overhead.
Find this book in the Davis Family Library through go/bookingit.
Booking It: Welcome to Night Vale
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