In his third novel, Welcome to Nightvale podcast creator and writer Joseph Fink (It Devours with Jeffrey Cranor) expands on the hit serial podcast Alice Isn't Dead in this flesh-crawling horror thriller with a heart."This isn't a story," Fink begins. "It's a road trip." When her wife, Alice, disappeared, Keisha searched for months, eventually held a funeral and then tried to overcome her grief in a world that no longer made sense. Things turned upside-down again when she began noticing Alice on the news, always in the crowd at the scene of tragedies across the United States. A year and a half later, Keisha works as a long-haul trucker so she can search the country for Alice.
On the road, she attracts the attention of an unkempt creature in a dirty polo bearing the word "thistle," who eats a living victim in front of her. Though human in appearance, the Thistle Man is "like a boogeyman from a vaguely recalled nightmare," and police officers turn a blind eye to his activities. Stalked by the predator, Keisha picks up a teen girl named Sylvia who lost her mother to the Thistle Man. Their ensuing investigation puts Keisha on the path to uncovering a dark world hidden within the shadows of our own. Its secrets are scattered through small towns across the country and guarded by corrupt police and a nameless evil that makes the Thistle Man look like a naughty puppy. To fight the darkness and find her wife, Keisha must harness a power she always considered a flaw, her chronic anxiety.
Fink switches from the podcast's first-person narration to third-person, occasionally stepping away from Keisha's point of view to follow Alice or give voice to the villains, Lovecraftian beings of malice and hunger. The narrator also tells anecdotes of other innocent people who encountered the monsters associated with Thistle, adding depth and scope to the threat much as Stephen King does in It. Moreover, the impermanence of setting and Keisha's vulnerability while sleeping in her truck, stopping in unfamiliar locations, ratchets up the tension.
In an author's note, Fink explains that Keisha's anxiety is modeled on his own, and certainly he achieves an eerie, off-kilter atmosphere that induces a constant sense of paranoia. Fans of the podcast will no doubt enjoy this expansion of Keisha's quest, but readers who have no familiarity with the story will likely appreciate its surprises and chills even more. Ultimately an endorsement of everyday heroism and community, Alice Isn't Dead resonates as a love story, a road trip novel and a campfire tale that taps into our most primal fears. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: This expansion of the hit podcast Alice Isn't Dead follows truckdriver Keisha as she battles an ancient evil while searching for her missing wife.