Today's post is on Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. It is 401 pages long and is published by Harper Perennial. The cover is purple with the skyline of Night Vale on it. The intended reader is someone who is a fan of the podcast. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. The story is mostly told in third person close of the two main characters with the occasional aside from Cecil or Carlos. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the inside of the book- 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 bot 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.
Review- As a hard-core fan of Welcome to Night Vale podcast I loved this book. It was everything I hoped for; funny, quirky, with lots of inside jokes, and an interesting outside of the radio show story. That said if you can not a fan of the podcast then I do not think that you are going to enjoy this novel as much I have, for the above reasons. The story is about a two women both looking for someone who happens to be the same person, sort-of in a Night Vale way. We get to know more about some side characters like the man in the tan jacket, the angels, and how traveling out of Night Vale is very difficult. The writing style is just like the podcast so I was very happy with that and I could hear Cecil's voice when we were taken to the radio station to get the news of the day. I really had fun with this novel and I look forward to reading the next one, It Devours.
I give this novel a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I bought this novel with my own money.
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