Now that I don’t have a commute, I really had to create time to finish my latest audiobook, but it was worth it. Today I finished Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, the first book put out by the team behind the Welcome to Night Vale fiction podcast and set in the same universe (as is likely apparent by the title). This book was written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink.

First, I don’t believe you need familiarity with the podcast to enjoy the novel. Nor do you need to read the novel if you’re a podcast listener; it builds on what listeners may know, but also centers incredibly peripheral characters from the show (local PTA mom Diane Crayton and pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro), so if you’re a podcast only fan, you’re not missing any crucial story information by forgoing the book. If you’re not a listener of the podcast, I think as long as you go in understanding that the core of Night Vale is the absurd and the surreal, you’ll be okay.

This was a fun book! I was curious to see how the Night Vale Presents team would manage a longform story in the world of Night Vale (podcast episodes are about 25 minutes and almost always self-contained), and I think they did a solid job! The book can be a bit slow, especially in the beginning; the drip of information it feeds you about the mysteries at the center of the story is indeed a drip. But it wasn’t so slow I found it tiresome, and the typical Night Vale weirdness and eccentricity kept me listening even where I wasn’t sure where this story was going (if anywhere).

It does a remarkably good job of translating a typical Night Vale podcast to full-length novel format. It includes the same wide-lens look at Night Vale, anecdotal strangeness, and moments of tender feeling that characterize the podcast episodes. It completely retains the “voice” of a podcast episode without straining itself too much. There are times when it becomes a little sidetracked with its own asides, and it seems keen to mention as many things from the podcast as it can, and once in a while it wears its own jokes down (“a vague yet menacing government agency” was very funny the first time; less so the sixth or seventh), but these complaints are quite minor and on the whole I had a lot of fun listening to this.

Between every couple chapters there are snippets of Cecil’s radio show commenting on various episodes around town, which usually tie into whatever Diane and Jackie are experiencing, and these short interludes help tie the novel to the podcast without being irritating or obtuse to someone who is not a podcast listener. As always, he does a particularly good job relating horrifying but typical Night Vale tales in a wholly unperturbed and even indifferent voice, which is always funny.

The audiobook is narrated by Cecil Baldwin, the same voice actor who narrates the podcast, and he excels here just as well; his voice is so soothing to listen to, and he differentiates between character voices well without veering into the annoying or excessively silly. There are also some guest appearances from other voice actors from the podcast.

Ultimately it returns to a theme which Night Vale perennially returns to—family. What counts as family, intra-family relationships, how to repair damaged family bonds, and when, perhaps, to cut ties with family. I think it has great success on this topic and I really enjoyed watching Diane’s relationship with her fifteen-year-old son Josh play out.

The other theme I would highlight is finding yourself. Jackie is nineteen at the start of the book and there’s a sense from many around her that she’s considered immature, and people feel she needs to grow up. Jackie isn’t sure how to do that or if she’s ready, and she struggles with this throughout the story. But even Diane, approaching middle age (she was quite young when she had Josh), deals with some identity development (at several points in the novel, Diane acknowledges that she “didn’t think of herself as the sort of person to do [X]” and yet here she is doing X). These story arcs are also rewarding, both in how Diane and Jackie push each other to grow, as well as how they grow on their own.

Overall, I think anyone, podcast listener or not, can enjoy Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, and the zany foibles of its characters—sometimes a social commentary on our own world, sometimes just an exercise in “wouldn’t it be strange/funny/scary if…”

books

booknook