Joseph Fink On Science, Religion, & Novelizing Night Vale

It Devours! is the second novel from Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, co-creators of the long-running Welcome to Night Vale podcast. The new novel peels back layers of the town’s pervading weirdness and provides answers to a few of the podcast’s biggest mysteries. In the process, it pairs up a scientist, Nilanjana Sikdar, with a devotee of the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, Darryl Ramirez, for an investigation that will explore, surprisingly deeply, the relationship between science and religion.
There’s a lot to chew on, so we tracked down one of the novel’s co-authors, Joseph Fink, to discuss some of the loftier questions posed in It Devours!
One of the remarkable things I saw in It Devours! is its protagonist—Nilanjana isa relative outsider to Night Vale, and she gives us a more questioning perspective of all the weirdness everyone else around her takes for granted. Was that a deliberate decision?
I don’t think we’ve ever felt the need to have the outsider character in Night Vale. Night Vale, from the beginning, has been this thing where we immerse you in this weird world and you just figure it out as you go. I don’t think we ever needed the outsider that everyone explains things to, and that wasn’t really why we chose Nilanjana.
It was more that we wanted [to feature] one of Carlos’ scientists. [Nilanjana] appears very briefly in the first novel, and so it made sense for us to do that. And in the story we’ve established for Night Vale, the scientists are newcomers to town. They arrived around the beginning of the podcast. So more grew out of what that character was, rather than us feeling like we had to have an outsider as the main character.
Likewise, there are any number of avenues to explore in this world you’ve created. What struck you about the Joyous Congregation? Why bring them into the story now?
A couple of [things]. They seemed interesting, story-wise. When you have this fictional world you’ve established, you’re always looking at little corners to try and see if there’s interesting stories to tell there, and there definitely seemed to be an interesting story to tell here. But also, we just really wanted to write a book about science and religion.
It’s something, I think, very important to both of us—especially to write a book about science and religion that wasn’t about the conflict [between] science and religion, and which one is right. That seemed a profoundly uninteresting thing to write about, and also, just a really myopic way of looking at that issue.
I was raised by a math professor. I was raised reading Richard Feynman books. Science has always been very important to me. But I was also raised religiously Jewish—going to synagogue at least once week, my father having Shabbat dinners at home. We really wanted to write a book about science and religion as modes of human thought that have their uses and their dangers, [which] should be considered for what they are.
I’m glad you brought that up, because it is a very universal novel. It has this struggle that we see all the time, even if here it’s surrounded by some of Night Vale’s bizarre happenings. But you walk away with the sense that the book doesn’t come down on one side or the other.
The stance we would take is, the conflict’s kind of fake. Or, it’s not fake, but it’s coming from the extremes of religion, for instance. The religious people [who] deny the basics of science are loud, but they’re in the vast minority. There are lots of religious people who are also scientists, or just religious people who completely trust in the process of science.
There are also scientists who think approaching things in a scientific way can be the whole of a worldview. And [it] can’t be because science tells you what a thing is, science tells you how a thing happens, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how you should feel about it, how you should act about it. There is no guidance in science. There is no value-assigning. That’s not what it’s set up to do. It is a mode of thought that isn’t set up for that.
And so, approaching the two modes of thought as [being] in conflict is inherently buying into the extremes of the issue.
As a side note to all of this, the Joyous Congregation’s pamphlets that appear throughout the book are delightful.
Jessica Hayworth is a truly incredible artist, [and] someone we work with all the time. Pretty much any time we can work with her, we find a way to do so.
She’s illustrated the book covers before, right?
For our two script volumes, she did both the covers and the internal illustrations. She did something like 50 internal illustrations for those. She’s also worked with the podcast for a bit. She’s done every single one of our touring live show posters, and a lot of our shirts. She’s somebody that we came into contact with early on, and she has the unique talent of being able to create very specific images that are still so general. She doesn’t draw what the characters look like. She just draws these horrific surreal scenes that have a real weight to them, and give you a sense of what Night Vale feels like.

This book draws together several threads from the podcast, like Welcome to Night Vale did before it. Here, it’s the Joyous Congregation and the Smiling God, the desert otherworld, The House That Doesn’t Exist, and, of course, Carlos. Obviously, you and Jeffrey understand the workings of Night Vale, and you know all these plot connections. But how much of this is in your head when you’re making the podcast, and how much of it do you work out when you’re writing the novel?
Mostly the latter. We don’t think of Night Vale as a puzzle that needs to be solved with a bunch of checkpoints to get to. It’s an ongoing world, and we always build on what we [have already]. We build on what we know about the characters and what we know about the place, and try to find new places to go from there. It’s also really important to us—with the novels, and with the live shows, these things that are going to go out in the wider world—we want each one to be completely accessible, even to people who have never heard a single episode of the podcast, or [don’t] even know the podcast exists. We need to create a story that is entirely self-contained and self-explanatory.
That said, because it is set in this world, there’s stuff in there that will just have greater context if you’ve heard the podcast. Larry Leroy in the book is somewhat of a minor character, but if you’ve listened to the podcast, there are a lot more layers to who he is.
In a similar way, we very intentionally brought back characters from the first novel as a way of allowing readers of [that book] to check in with them again, and see what’s happening with them. It was a mini-sequel within this book, showing you what’s been going on with those characters. But at the same time, we made sure to write those scenes in a way that if you had no idea who those people were, those scenes would still work.

Welcome to Night Vale, the podcast, has blossomed into Night Vale Presents, a home to a number of podcasts. And, of course, you’ve still got the touring shows, and these novels. How do you recharge your creativity? How do you keep producing new things?
That’s a good question, because just before talking to you, I was going through my to-do list for today, and it’s a lot.
My father wrote musicals for a living. He wrote musicals for children to do in schools, and he ran a publishing company to sell those musicals. So, his job was to be an artist. A lot of that time as a working artist you spend balancing your books, balancing your finances, making runs to mail all the musicals to the teachers who have bought them. I was raised with a clear understanding of what it meant to be a working artist, and that it meant you spend a lot more time working than you do being an artist. That’s just the bargain you make in order to pay the bills for that art. So, things like recharging creativity or things like that, I feel like that’s something that belongs to artists who don’t have to pay the bills with [their art].
I don’t have time to have writer’s block. I have too many deadlines. I’m going to do this interview, and answer some emails, and then do some other administrative stuff I have to do, and then I have to write a chunk of a novel that I have a contract to write. And it doesn’t matter if I feel inspired about it. In a lot of ways, it’s a thing on my to-do list I need to do. I don’t know if this is the best way to make art, but it is the only way to make art and make a living from it the way our current society is set up.
On that note, can we expect more Night Vale novels, and do you already have ideas for them?
I hope so, and yes. The novel I’m working on right now is actually the Alice Isn’t Dead [podcast] novel, so that’s not a Night Vale thing. But yes, I can tell you we definitely have ideas we are working on for future Night Vale novels. I can’t say for sure, just because deals don’t exist for them yet. But we really enjoy writing these, and I think our hope is to keep writing them as long as people are interested in reading them.
It Devours! is available today in a signed edition from Barnes & Noble.