Welcome to Night Vale

Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale is a book that builds a very creative urban fantasy setting with witty prose, finding in the absurd the ideal medium to explore its nihilistic worldview. Based on a podcast of the same name, Welcome to Night Vale is a funny and surprisingly thoughtful novel.

The setting is the town of Night Vale, a place that looks like the aberrant child of Lovecraft and Kafka, with its own rules of time and space, where monstrous creatures coexist with humans so immersed in their routines that they don’t have the time and energy to care about the fact that nothing around them makes any sense. It’s a city where hooded beings live in the shadows and organize the city traffic, people howl to greet others, a sentient cloud sells movie tickets, and librarians devour everyone they meet.

In this place, we follow the journey of two characters: Diane is a single mother, who has to deal with the continued interest of her son, Josh, in discovering the identity of the father who abandoned them before he was born. Jackie, meanwhile, is a 19-year-old girl who has her quiet life turned upside down when she receives a note with the words KING CITY, which marks her hand.

The narrative is keen to subvert expectations to produce a sense of absurdity. Nothing in Night Vale makes sense, so this is reflected in the prose. Sometimes sentences enter in conflict with one another (“Jackie was alone. The doctor was standing beside her”), sometimes they contradict what has just happened (“Good-bye, waved the man, saying nothing”). Sometimes, the characteristics of communication are subverted in the theoretical field (“She knew that messages were for the sender, not the receiver”), sometimes in the practical one: the narrator occasionally compares the intentions of both interlocutors in a conversation to reveal to us that, although the dialogue had a logical beginning, middle, and end, the information that each party wanted to convey to the other was lost because of completely unreasonable inferences – which is absurd, but also relatable.

Time is also a problem in Night Vale, which allows metaphorical situations to become literal. In this excerpt, for instance, “Troy always looked exactly how he thought he looked. He never loved Diane until they met. Then he always loved her. Until later, when he never loved her,” Troy’s feelings for Diane are actually affected retroactively, no longer having ever existed.

After all, the city of Night Vale follows its own internal logic, based on oxymorons, chance, arbitrariness, and instinct. Characters usually start from real, logical assumptions but arrive at quite surreal conclusions. Jackie, for example, maintains a pawn shop and every day when she’s about to close it, she takes special care to prevent thieves from breaking in: “Because of the lack of working time in Night Vale, she went off her gut feeling about when the shop should close. When the feeling came, it came, and the doors had to be locked, removed from their frames, and safely hidden.”

Most jokes have some method behind them. Diane’s son, Josh, for example, manages to change his shape without much control, which illustrates the constant transformations that occur in the body of a teenager. This also illustrates Josh’s search for an identity, as he tries to figure out how he stands in relation to his father, his mother, and the world: “Josh looks like a lot of things. He changes his physical form constantly. In this way he is unlike most boys his age. He thinks he is several things at once, many of them contradictory. In this way he is like most boys his age.”

Similarly, Jackie has a special condition – turning 19 every year – that is sometimes used to demonstrate her immaturity, but also to criticize a certain condescending and oppressive attitude some have towards people who suffer from depression: one of the questions that Jackie has to listen to every time is “Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?” as if it were something that simply depended on her effort to be overcome.

Talking about Jackie’s age, the narrative establishes a conflict between getting old and being young with its two main characters. Jackie’s motivational discourse at one point, for example, is typically juvenile in its immediacy (“We can do this, Jackie said. Just move before you can think about consequences”), while Diane’s often talks with sermons and condescension. With Diane, the book also deals with the difficulties of motherhood, showing the exhaustion resulting from double burden, in addition to providing, in the midst of all the madness, really touching moments, such as Josh’s almost inaudible “I love you too,” after a regular discussion with his mother.

Welcome to Night Vale is also a nihilistic novel, concerned with the deconstruction of values and convictions. Characters constantly reflect on existential emptiness, the meaninglessness of life, and their insignificance as individuals. These ideas are further reinforced by some plot twists that demonstrate how the characters are tiny in the grand scheme of things, pushed around by arbitrary events with no rhyme or reason – which doesn’t mean the narrative is not tied together neatly.

The novel’s only failure is regarding fan service: there are several irrelevant events in the book that don’t fulfill any narrative function besides catering to the fans, such as Jackie’s visit to the scientist Carlos: nothing significant occurs there and if the scene was cut off the book, nothing would change.

Mixing horror with the absurd, Welcome to Night Vale is a strangely amusing nihilistic novel. It couldn’t be more fitting then, that the reaction provoked by its frightening conclusions is mainly laughter.

July 18, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 09, 2016.