by Joseph Fink
New York Times Bestseller
"Hypnotic and darkly funny. . . . Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in." —The Guardian
"A splendid, weird, moving novel."— NPR.org
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.
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.
New York Times Bestseller
"Hypnotic and darkly funny. . . . Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in." —The Guardian
"A splendid, weird, moving novel."— NPR.org
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.
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.
Reviews-
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April 27, 2015
Fink and Cranor, co-creators of the popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast, successfully expand the mythology of their strange desert town. The novel follows Diane Crayton, whose shapeshifting son’s absentee father has just come back to town, and Jackie Fierro, who’s been the 19-year-old proprietor of Night Vale’s pawnshop for the last several decades. After peculiar, half-remembered encounters with a man in a tan jacket, both women keep coming back to the same phrase: King City. Diane and Jackie have to work together to peel back the mysteries surrounding King City while trying to protect their loved ones. Though the book meanders a bit in the middle, the end is satisfying, with a surprising origin story for one of the characters. Fans will find it refreshing to see Night Vale from different perspectives and to meet characters who have only been mentioned before in passing, but knowledge of the podcast isn’t required to follow the story. This unusual experiment in format-shifting works surprisingly well. -
Starred review from August 15, 2015
All hail the glow cloud as the weird and wonderful town of Night Vale brings itself to fine literature. Creators Fink and Cranor offer fans of their (oc)cult podcast Welcome to Night Vale a fantastic addition with a stand-alone tale of the mysterious desert town that also offers loyal listeners some interesting clues about the nature of the place. Readers who are unfamiliar with the podcast shouldn't be put off-they still get an eccentric thriller with a specific sense of humor that mimics the omnipresent spookiness of Twin Peaks. Artist Kate Leth, who collaborates on the podcast, once described the project this way: "It's like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman started building a town in The Sims and then just...left it running. For years." Fortunately, the writers are firmly confident in their creation. "Look, life is stressful," the book tells us. "This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life." The main plot largely centers on two characters and their search for a hidden city. Perpetually 19-year-old Jackie Fierro runs the local pawn shop and is perplexed when A Man in a Tan Jacket gives her a note reading simply "King City." Meanwhile, PTA mom Diane Crayton loses her teenage son and must join forces with Jackie to find this mysterious place. It's all pretty far out there on the weird-ometer, but the novel is definitely as addictive as its source material. The book also pays fan service by punctuating its chapters with original broadcasts by Night Vale narrator Cecil Gershwin Palmer and cameos by fan favorites like Old Woman Josie, Carlos the sexy scientist, and the aforementioned Glow Cloud. A delightfully bonkers media crossover that will make an incredible audiobook.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 1, 2015
Here's the print incarnation of the popular eponymous podcast, a horror/sf dystopia whose newscaster narrator, Cecil, blithely mingles rants from The Old Woman without a Face, PTA updates, and decrees from the shadowy World Government. Nineteen-year-old pawnbroker Jackie Fierro and PTA treasurer Diane Crayton are given perplexing notes labeled King City by a man wearing a tan jacket. The man instructs Diane to give the message to her shape-shifting teenage son, Josh, but she has no intention of involving him until she understands what King City is and why the note won't detach from her hand. Then Josh's deadbeat father, Troy, returns to Night Vale and begins cheerfully stalking Jackie. Determined to recapture Night Vale's version of normalcy, Jackie and Diane reluctantly team up to investigate King City, the tan-jacketed man, and Troy's appearance. Sporting all of Night Vale's oddities with the podcast's trademark nonchalance, this debut is bound to please the podcast's fans, but newcomers may want to take a listen first to avoid missing the inside jokes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.) -
May 1, 2015
Surely you've heard of Night Vale, that funky little town in the eponymous (and bubbling-over popular) podcast and touring show created by Fink and cowritten by him and Cranor. Drawing on the podcast, this novel features 19-year-old pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro, thrown by an encounter with a mysterious stranger, while PTA president Diane Crayton must contend with cranky, shape-shifting son Josh and repeated sightings of Josh's father, looking the same as he did when he decamped years ago. The podcast has been No. 1 on iTunes, and the shows have been known to sell out in 20 seconds; with a 150,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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September 1, 2015
"Welcome to Night Vale" is a popular podcast of public radio broadcasts presumably from the fictional town of Night Vale, a uniquely surreal place isolated in the desert. Inspired by the podcasts, this first novel from creator/writer Fink and writer Cranor focuses on a few residents: pawn shop owner Jackie, who has been 19 for many decades, and Diane, an office drone and PTA member whose son, Jack, constantly changes his physical form. At the pawn shop, a strange man in a tan jacket sells Jackie a piece of paper with the words KING CITY written on it. She tries to destroy the paper, but no matter what she does, she's always holding it. Meanwhile, one of Diane's coworkers vanishes and everyone else denies his existence. These mysteries converge as Jackie and Diane begin a quest to discover the secret of the man and his indestructible paper, which might even lead to their venturing out of Night Vale. Their journey eventually takes them to the library, considered the most dangerous place in town--its librarians have toxic blood. VERDICT Fans of the podcast will enjoy learning more Night Vale lore, and fantasy readers may also enjoy, depending on how tolerant they are of non sequiturs. Others, though, may not find enough to sustain a novel of this length. [See Editors' Picks, p. 28; Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Washington Post ""The book is charming and absurd - think "This American Life" meets "Alice in Wonderland."
- Austin Chronicle "Longtime listeners and newcomers alike are likely to appreciate the ways in which Night Vale, as Fink puts it, "treats the absurd as normal and treats the normal as absurd." What they might not foresee is the emotional wallop the novel delivers in its climactic chapters."
- The Guardian "The hit podcast is absurd and hilarious, and as a book it's similarly entertaining..."
- Los Angeles Times "Fink and Cranor's prose hints there's an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations. . . . the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world."
- Detroit Free Press "As a companion piece, "Welcome to Night Vale" will be hard to resist. Though the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world, its mysteries - like the richest conspiracy theories - don't exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape."
- Minneapolis Star Tribune "The charms of 'Welcome to Night Vale' are nearly impossible to quantify. That applies to the podcast, structured as community radio dispatches from a particularly surreal desert town, as well as this novel, written by the podcast's co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor."
- Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside "This is the novel of your dreams. . . . A story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys and spring-loaded trap doors of the small town home you'll realize you've always missed living in. When it says 'welcome,' it's mandatory. You belong here."
- Wil Wheaton "Welcome To Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to to vivid life. . . . It is as weird and surreal as I hoped it would be, and a surprisingly existential meditation on the nature of time, reality, and the glow cloud that watches over us."
