Welcome to Night Vale
Written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink in 2015
The Raccoon: In a small town where the dog park is only open to mysterious hooded figures, the highway is filled with ghost cars and government surveillance vans, and angels--that the City Council insists do not exist--help with household chores, perpetual teenager Jackie Fierro and PTA mom Diane Crayton still manage to find their lives turned upside down after they each receive a cryptic slip of paper. Welcome to Night Vale, based on the podcast of the same name, uses wild surrealism to address the human insecurities and issues that even the best dramas tend to gloss over.
UNMASKED: Welcome to Night Vale the podcast deserves a 19/20. Cranor and Fink’s writing, brought to life by voice actor Cecil Baldwin, is hauntingly sublime; the listener is drawn into the unique world of Night Vale and left at the end of every episode with a feeling akin to anatidaephobia. Cecil’s narration capitalizes on fear of the unknown. In the same way that the clawing and growling behind the door in a movie are scarier than the monster itself, the podcast’s lack of explanation as to why librarians need to be avoided at all costs and how a boy transitions from Eagle Scout to Blood Pact Scout ensure that the concepts remain lodged in the back of one’s mind and under the kitchen sink.
Writers typically use novels when they wish to illustrate detailed scenes and capture the nuances of dialogue. Unfortunately, these features are a terrible match for Welcome to Night Vale. Although the plot is suspenseful and varied, and the characters are profoundly relatable, the novel simply casts too much light on a world intricately designed to be vague and shadowed. Is it still Night Vale without the night or the veil?
Strengths:
- A chapter describing Diane’s relationship with her shape-shifting son perfectly captures the challenges of raising any teenage son. A clever quirk of Welcome to Night Vale is that it sidesteps forced metaphors by making the exaggerated and surreal a natural part of the setting.
- The novel’s ridiculous notion of research and the scientific method (“None of the scientists noticed her. They were all writing busily on clipboards and wearing lab coats. This is called ‘doing an experiment.’”), along with a few other other multi-page tangents, actually made me laugh out loud.
- The faceless old woman that lives in Diane’s house is the only character I have ever encountered who successfully adds to a story despite objectively having no relevance to the plot.
Weaknesses:
- While the novel can still be appreciated independently, almost every character and place originated in the podcast, and the novel is much better understood with that background.
- The fact that everything in Night Vale falls in a spectrum from off-putting to unspeakably horrifying ironically leads to a lack of stakes in the novel. After all, if the characters have survived for this long, why would yet another supernatural event be cause for alarm?
Rating: 16/…
The number between 19 and 21 no longer exists. The City Council apologizes for the inconvenience but hopes that this decision will foster greater appreciation for all 154 other numbers.
Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you begin to wonder how the universe can be so ordered and mathematical.
