Welcome to Night Vale originated as a scripted podcast from Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, who fused elements of Lovecraftian horror with small-town radio programs in creating the cultishly adored series. In their novelistic adaptation of the eerie yet comic landscape of Night Vale, Fink and Cranor have managed to create an excellent stand-alone book perfect for newcomers while also including plenty of winks to longtime fans.
They introduce the reader to a phantasmagoric world through Jackie Fierro, a pawnshop owner who is inexplicably decades-old and exactly 19 at the same time, and Diane Crayton, the emotionally distant single mother of an angsty, shape-shifting teenager. The plot is relatively simple: Jackie and Diane must find a town called King City for bizarre reasons involving a man who wears a tan jacket and carries a deerskin suitcase and, we are told, "had normal human features" (the book thrives on the juxtaposition of odd specifics with broad vagaries).
Fink and Cranor adopt a sink-or-swim attitude to Welcome to Night Vale's readers, gleefully throwing them headfirst into an ocean of weird. Some newcomers will undoubtedly be put off by sentences like this description of Night Vale's library: "Off the hallway were various reading rooms, for reading, and community rooms, for communing, and bloodletting rooms, for a different kind of communing"--but many more will be delighted by Fink's and Cranor's dry wit. In other words: "All hail the mighty Glow Cloud." --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books