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.
“Hypnotic and darkly funny. . . . Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with … and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in.”–The Guardian
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.
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You’ll laugh, you’ll be confused, you’ll love. If you haven’t caught up with the Podcast, it may be a good idea to go back and listen to those first then jump in.
Very strange people/creatures in this town and it’s never dull.
Very much like the podcast. It’s okay, but the tone and style of writing, which I enjoyed at first, became too much to take before I could finish.
Poorly written
Funky and hilarious, yet shockingly terrifying, this book is a rollercoaster all the way through. Not for every reader, but certainly for me.
I love Joseph Fink’s books. They remind me of Twin Peaks. A great escape. A must read if you follow the pod cast.
The book was well-written.
If you enjoy surreal stories that NEVER quit being surreal, where one VERY odd premise is piled onto another and another and another ad infinitum then this IS for you.
If you are a fan of the podcast I think you will like this book.
I could not finish it. I like a solid ending – even if it is an ending that promises more to come. I suspect that it is in the best interest of the authors to keep their fan base entertained.i just picked up the wrong book
“A friendly desert community. Where the sun is hot, and the moon is beautiful, and strange light pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.” Welcome to Night Vale. This book was so much fun. All the quirky, odd, somewhat ridiculous goings on in our favorite desert town. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast any at all, I highly recommend the books.
Something about the magic of the podcast doesn’t translate quite perfectly into a novel format, but it still shapes up to be an entertaining and occasionally funny read. Welcome to Night Vale is a novel spin-off of the legendary podcast of the same name, taking place in the same unusual town but featuring a few town residents mentioned but never described in the original podcast.
Jackie Fierro runs Night Vale’s only pawn shop, buying everything that comes her way for eleven dollars and trying not to think about the fact that she’s been nineteen for a very, very long time and her family and friends have all passed her by. Her life is interrupted by a Night Vale podcast regular: a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase leaking flies, and while he gives her a note she can’t seem to get rid of, she’s determined to forget about the whole situation and continue with her life. Our other protagonist is Diane Crayton, PTA member and mother to Josh, a teenage boy who is sometimes human and sometimes an odd rock and sometimes a bird. While navigating the trials of single motherhood, Josh’s father resurfaces, dragging out old memories and the mystery of the man in the tan jacket with him.
Jackie and Diane make for an unlikely duo that serves as the heart of the novel: Jackie is nineteen but has been nineteen for centuries, mature in her own right, while Diane can’t seem to see her as anything other than another teenager to look after. But Jackie isn’t as mature as she thinks she is, stuck at nineteen for a reason, and Diane has her own problems with motherhood she can’t seem to get a grip on. There’s a lot of great interactions between the two, almost a mother-daughter relationship, almost friends, a journey from hostility to cooperation that worked very well. Diane also figures out her connection to motherhood with her relationship with Josh, which has been fraught due to normal teenage issues, the less common but still normal problem of him wanting to know more about his absent father, and the other Night Valean problems like trying to teach your son to drive when he insists on transforming into a giant winged beast in the car. Josh and Diane have an odd relationship; although it’s obvious they feel immense love for each other, they don’t actually talk a lot and it was hard to get a grip on Josh’s character when he spends a lot of his time as nonverbal animals and objects. I wish Josh and Diane had as much interaction as Diane and Jackie, as Diane’s driving force throughout the novel is to keep Josh safe from his father and other mysterious forces and we never quite know who Josh is by himself.
This novel came as a great interest to someone who listened to the podcast back in the day and still remembered one of the greatest characters: the man in the tan jacket. This novel gives us more of his backstory, more about his actual personality beyond his appearance and the fact that he is forgotten by anyone he meets. This novel will probably be more interesting to those who have already listened to the podcast; while it’s marketed as a stand-alone with no previous knowledge necessary. While this is technically true, I imagine the average reader won’t find a lot of this plot interesting as what propelled me to keep reading was mostly to figure out the mystery behind one of the podcast’s most iconic figures. Detours into different parts of Night Vale and meeting with other known podcast characters gives us a little thrill at the shared universe, but didn’t really add much to the story. Seeing Carlos and having transcripts of Cecil’s radio broadcasts, our two main characters from the podcast, was fun but not necessary. Just extraneous bits that made the novel longer than it should’ve been.
Which leads me to my biggest problem: you probably could’ve chopped off a hundred pages from the first half of the novel and had no issues. The first hundred or so pages are general exposition, establishing character, setting, and Diane and Jackie’s problems, but the next hundred don’t have a ton of purpose. There’s fighting between Diane and Jackie even as they work towards the same goal, each suspecting the other of interfering with their own investigations for not very well explained reasons. Brief detours around the city, incorporating more of Night Vale’s more popular locations from the podcast but not ultimately adding anything to the narrative. It just felt like a slog. This was both of the authors’ first novel, so I knew going in it wasn’t going to be perfect, but after so many tightly-paced and plotted podcast episodes I wasn’t expecting such a long falter. There was little plot development here, nothing that wasn’t already previously established, and the constant squabbling between our two protagonists ensured that there wasn’t any continuation along their particular character arcs either. I stalled on this book for a long time because of those pages; it felt like I was just seeing the same fight repeated over at different locations, and even though the novel alludes to the repetition, that doesn’t fix the problem.
This novel was a cute addition to the Night Vale universe. I wish it had been more focused, but I can understand the excitement of wanting to explore the town in a different format. Diane and Jackie start out slow but turn into a dynamic duo, and the climax of the novel, although I won’t spoil it, is rife with excellent family dynamics and genuine emotional moments that you wouldn’t expect from a city with man-eating librarians and cosmic terrors. Even in Night Vale, we explore and replicate real-world issues that challenge motherhood and the trials of growing older, culminating in a lovely ending that would’ve been perfect if we could’ve gotten there a bit quicker. This novel is a must for fans of the original podcast, but not for a reader looking for a new universe to jump into.
review blog
I don’t rightly know how to describe this book except to say that entering this world will change your perceptions of every day events in your real life. It’s a sci-fi commentary on modern life which will make your hair stand on end and made me see some activities in a new light. It also had me reevaluate what I hold near and dear. It’s was a scary, crazy, funny ride which I didn’t quite “love” and after which I was perturbed for weeks. Not my typical “gush” but after you read this read “Alice Isn’t Dead” by Joseph Fink of the Nightvale crew and continue the ride. What is important? What do you hold dear and what will you do to keep it? These are the questions and the consequences.
If you enjoy a little weirdness in your life you will love this strange and unexpectedly emotional read. Based on a podcast and populated with bizarre characters—almost alternate dimension kind if stuff. I loved it.
Everyone keeps saying that the reason they did not like the book is because it is “weird”. Isn’t that the whole point of welcome to Night Vale in the first place? To be “weird”? It’s definitely something unique and charming in it’s own way.
I was listening to an audio version of the book. I got through the first 2 hours of the audio book and realized I had 10 more hours to go and gave up. It was similar to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books (which I enjoy), with weird characters & settings, but it seemed to try too hard to make things VERY weird. It just wasn’t a book I wanted to continue reading.
Like something straight out of the Twilight Zone, the town of Night Vale is a strange place filled with strange yet wonderful beings.
Welcome to Night Vale the novel is a fantastic book that is based on the quirky Podcast of the same name. This bestseller will keep you curious from page one and will captivate your heart!
This book is too weird for me. And it is quite disjointed, jumping from character to character with many ancedotes and side stories in between.
Could not get through it.
If you enjoy the podcast, you will love this book. If you are unfamiliar, there is a lot you won’t understand.
If you love the podcast (and I do!) you will love this book (and I did!). Nothing else really needs to be said.
Stupid, I like strange, fantastic, weird worlds as much as anyone, but that was simply dumb
Read the book before finding out that it was a series. Tried to watch and couldn’t. I love the grit and characters of the town.