In my rich,
interesting, and varied reading life, I have made friends with numerous strange
and weird novels. From Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves – the story of a house larger on the inside than on
the outside – my mind has been bent, my logic challenged, and my thought
processes twisted beyond understanding.
However, a new novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor has topped them
all for sheer bewilderment. Welcome to Night Vale stemmed from a
podcast posted by the authors and presented as a radio show for the
fictional town of Night Vale, which reported on the strange events that occur there.
The series was created in 2012. Cecil
Gershwin Palmer is the host, main character, and narrator of the novel.
The podcast typically airs on the first and fifteenth of
every month, and consists of "news, announcements and advertisements"
from the desert town, located "somewhere in the Southwestern U.S.” In an interview with NPR, Joseph Fink said
that he "came up with this idea of a town in that desert where all
conspiracy theories were real, and we would just go from there with that
understood.”
The novel is part suspense, part mystery, mostly comedic,
and all mind-bending. To give a taste of
the novel, I will offer a few short passages, none of which will give away any
the plot, but all will reveal details of the story. That’s my version of a typical line by the
authors. Buckle up, here we go:
“Clocks and
calendars don’t work in Night Vale. Time
itself doesn’t work” (4). “There was
always some world-ending cataclysm threatening Night Vale. Feral dogs.
A sentient glowing cloud with the ability to control minds (although the
Glow Cloud had become less threatening since its election to the local school
board)’ (5). Most mind-bending of all is
this description of Jackie Ferro, a perpetual 19-year old woman who ran a pawn
shop. The authors wrote, “She understood
the world and her place in it. She
understood nothing. The world and her
place in it were nothing and she understood that” (5). Jackie meets a mysterious man she does not
recognize, and decides “to make a list of everyone who might know about” him.
[…] She pulled out “a promotional pen from a festival put on by the city a few
years ago. THE NIGHT VALE SHAKESPEARE IN
A PIT FESTIVAL. FALL INTO THE BARD’S
WORDS, it said. The broken leg had been
painful, but she did love the pen” (43).
Jackie visits “Old
Woman Josie” to find out if she knows anything about her missing son,
Josh. “She turned. There was a being that was difficult to
describe, although the best and most illegal description was ‘angel.’ Angels are tall, genderless beings who are
all named Erika” (58). Of course they do
not exist. // “‘I was just doing some trimming,’ the being said. They were holding hedge trimmers and standing
by an empty patch of dirt. There were no
plants of any kind anywhere near them” (58).
I could go on like
this for way more time than I have, or don’t have, or wish I didn’t have, or
have, but this fun and breezy read will offer many hours of humor, suspense,
tears, joy, and mystery. Classified as a
YA novel, adults are forbidden to read it.
In fact, everyone should read it.
Let me be the first to give you a hearty “Welcome to Night Vale” by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 10/20/15.
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