Welcome to Night Vale
The Welcome to Night Vale series, Book 1
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Harper Perennial
Fiction, Humor/Literary Fiction/Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The desert town of Night Vale is a place much like any other, where monstrous librarians stalk the shelves of their bookish domain, where the waitress at the local all-night cafe offers customers invisible pie and fresh fruit growing from the branches that sprout from her wooden body, where every road out of town seems to loop right back to the city limits, and where the ghost of a faceless old woman can be found in every home... just your typical small American town. There are many stories in the streets of Night Vale, many happenings that might be deemed odd or even impossible.
Jackie Fierro runs Night Vale's only pawn shop, though she's only nineteen, and has been only nineteen for decades, possibly centuries. It's a shop as peculiar as the town itself, where people are as likely to bring in cursed plastic flamingos or single tears as watches or jewelry, and as likely to be paid in dreams or secrets as with money. Still, for all the strangeness that she works with daily, even she is disturbed when the man in the tan suit hands her a peculiar sheet of paper that she cannot let go of, no matter how hard she tries - a paper with the words "King City" printed upon it. Who is the man? Where is King City? And why is her ordered, ordinary life now skewing so far out of her control?
Single mother Diane Crayton has been working for many years at an office where nobody quite knows what they do, even the employees, but it pays well enough to support herself and her son Josh. Raising a boy who changes shape daily - everything from new faces to utterly inhuman forms and even inanimate objects - is a challenge, especially now that he's a teenager and starting to ask uncomfortable questions about his long-absent father Troy. The man disappeared shortly after Josh was born, and she hasn't seen him since... until, out of the blue, she spies him in the streets of Night Vale. Only there seems to be more than one Troy, a puzzle further complicated when she has an encounter with a man whose name and face she cannot remember but who presses upon her a piece of paper on which are written the words "King City".
Jackie and Diane have little in common, and don't even necessarily like each other, but as their paths keep crossing they realize that they're both facing a greater mystery, and a greater danger, than either can solve on their own.
REVIEW: I have never listened to the long-running podcast on which this book is based, so it's likely I'm missing some context or nuance coming at the story cold. As promised, Welcome to Night Vale delivers a surreal, often darkly comic aesthetic and a tale that bends reality and even causality into five-dimensional pretzels. At some point, though, the story and characters feel a bit lost in the constant firehose of strange happenings and tangential oddities.
With a constant through-line of odd broadcasts from the town's only radio station and talk show, "Welcome to Night Vale", the tale wastes little time laying the weird foundations for what turns out to be a very weird journey. Night Vale exists in a sort of alternate reality, like the far fringes of the multiverse where infinite possibilities begin breaking down into bizarre improbabilities and dream (or nightmare) logic. Time itself doesn't function properly, to the point where each person seems to live their own lives entirely out of synch with their neighbors. Characters who live in a town like this cannot help but be a bit strange, but they're also unfortunately difficult to care about or relate to, even when dealing with relatable themes like family friction and a crisis of life direction. I didn't particularly like either Jackie or Diane, and the town itself was so disconnected from anything like continuity or reality that nothing that happened in, around, or to it seemed to matter anyway. This sense of detachment was not helped by how the nominal heroines often did unintelligent things at unintelligent times, even given the peculiar standards and circumstances of existence in Night Vale. That said, there were several lines that had me chuckling out loud, and some interesting ideas. It had some nice moments and memorable imagery, and I wanted to enjoy it. By the end, though, I found the resolution flat and unsatisfactory, like a very long walk down what was ultimately a short trail to nowhere and back, a story that seemed less interested in telling itself than about relating the strange, silly surreality of its setting.
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