Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink

I started listening to Welcome to Night Vale the podcast sometime last year. I won’t say I was immediately hooked, but I will say that it didn’t take very long.

The premise is that you’re listening to an episode of a nightly community radio show in a dessert town named Night Vale where nothing is as you expect and librarians are terrifying.

Welcome to Night Vale: a Novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor was eagerly anticipated by me since the moment they announced it, so I was thrilled to have it quietly delivered to my kindle on Tuesday with a minimum of bloodshed and sacrifices to the Old Gods.

And as a fan of Night Vale, I loved it. It’s a wonderful sort of romp through this mysterious town, and we get to see glimpses of normal life, and meet all our favorite characters at a level which simply cannot be portrayed through the podcast’s format.

But.

It’s written in the same presumptuous, rhetorical, philosophical style as the podcast, and since my inner voice doesn’t sound like Cecil Baldwin, it just got really weary and heavy really fast. Sometimes I don’t even like the weight of the audio, and yet here it was written down.

And then all those “glimpses” I mentioned above were pretty much just that. We went to see Old Woman Josie! Why? I still don’t know. She said some Night-Vale-style techno-babble and that was that. The Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Their Home was mentioned several times, but not for any reason. There was a tarantula, but it was just distracting, and then a bit depressing, and then referred to as if it had been used as a metaphor, even though it had not. The flies had a play, but their purpose was ultimately inconsequential to the book.

In fact, there were only one or two subtle details that were mentioned that tied in to the plot’s resolution at all, so we were left with a net full of red herrings and little else– which to some extent is how the podcast presents thing; all details are equally important and unimportant, and the gun in the first act is not required to reappear in the third, even if we spent the whole of the second discussing it and it’s possibilities. But it’s frustrating to read that as a book. If these things are just there to be weird and distracting, do they need to be there at all? or if they do, then, do we need so @#$%ing MANY of them???!!

And then, lastly, the characters, Diane and Jackie, were nearly impossible for me to tell apart. Even in the middle of the book I still had to pause and retrace my eyesteps to figure out which character we were talking about. It was as if the book had been written from an “untethered” third person perspective (you know, when an author slips from a close-up in one mind to a close-up in another without warning or true omniscience; there’s a term for it I can’t remember now, though)– except that it wasn’t. The perspectives changed with the chapters, there just wasn’t a damn thing about how the two women’s voices were written that distinguished them. Except when they were talking because Jackie occasionally, and almost without cause, would slip “man” and “dude” into her speech. Add that to two names which my mind likes to read as “boring name one” and “boring name two,” and unless character-specific things were mentioned (Diane is a Mom, Jackie has been 19 for centuries) they spent half the book being pretty much the same person to me.

But despite all that, I swear that I liked it, and I’ll read a sequel if I get the chance, yet as to you reading it, I’d say only if you’re already a fan. And even then I’d strongly recommend the audiobook version if you can get it (Cecil reads it), since honestly this was read like the transcript for a really, really, long podcast, and not a novel at all.