Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel - Softcover

Fink, Joseph; Cranor, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062351435 ISBN 13: 9780062351432

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2017

Synopsis

From the creators of the #1 international hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale 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.

Welcome to Night Vale . . . a friendly desert community somewhere in the American Southwest. In this ordinary little town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are commonplace parts of everyday life, the lives of two women, with two mysteries, are about to converge.

Pawnshop proprietor Jackie Fierro abides by routine. But a crack appears in the standard order of her perpetually nineteen-year-old life when a mysterious man in a tan jacket gives her a slip of paper marked by two pencil-smudged words: KING CITY. Everything about the man unsettles her, especially the paper that she cannot remove from her hand. Yet when Jackie puts her life on hold to search for the man, no one who meets him can seem to remember anything about him.

Diane Crayton’s fifteen-year-old son, Josh, is moody and a shape-shifter. Lately, Diane has started to see the boy’s father everywhere she goes, looking the same as he did the day he left when they were teenagers. Josh is growing ever more curious about his estranged father—leading to a disaster Diane can see coming but is helpless to prevent.

Diane’s search to reconnect with her son and Jackie’s search to reclaim her routine life draw them increasingly closer to each other, and to this place that may hold the key to their mysteries and their futures . . . if they can ever find it.

 

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Welcome to Night Vale

“This is the novel of your dreams. . . . A friendly (but terrifying) and comic (but dark) and glittering (but bleak) story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys, and spring-loaded trapdoors of the small town home you’ll realize you’ve always missed living in.”—Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside

“Those of us who have gotten to know Night Vale through Cecil Palmer’s biweekly radio broadcasts can finally see what it’s like to actually live there. It is as weird and surreal as I hoped it would be, and a surprisingly existential meditation on the nature of time, reality, and the Glow Cloud that watches over us.”—Wil Wheaton

“Take Conan’s Hyboria, teleport it to the American Southwest, dress all the warriors in business casual and hide their swords under the floorboards — that’s Night Vale: absurd, magical, wholly engrossing, and always harboring some hidden menace.”—John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van

“I’ve been a fan of Welcome to Night Vale for years, and in that time writers Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have delighted me with stories that are clever, twisted, beautiful, strange, wonderful, and sweet. This book does all of that and so much more. It’s even better than I’d hoped. I think this might be the best book I’ve read in years.”—Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind

“This small town full of hooded figures, glowing clouds, cryptically terrifying public policies, and flickering realities quickly feels more like home than home. . . . There is nothing like Night Vale, in the best possible way.”—Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Name of the Star

“They’ve done the unthinkable: merged the high weirdness and intense drama of Night Vale to the pages of a novel that is even weirder, even more intense than the podcast.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and coeditor of Boing Boing

About the Author

Joseph Fink created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn't Dead podcasts. He lives with his wife in New York.

Jeffrey Cranor cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also cocreates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0062351435
• ISBN 13: 9780062351432
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416