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Weird at Last, Weird at Last: The Welcome to Night Vale Novel Is Here
Imagine you are reading a book. But the book is a podcast. The podcast is not something that can be known. It can only be experienced, tactile and mysterious, only truly understood as its granular details slip through your fingers like sand through a sieve.
Or something like that.
Rejoice, dear listeners, for the long-awaited Welcome to Night Vale novel has arrived, and it is just as wonderfully weird as you hoped and expected. While the book is a standalone story, it is inevitably entangled with the bizarro cast of characters that make this friendly desert town the nightmare that it is: Old Woman Josie, John Peters (you know, the farmer), Mayor Dana Cardinal, the angels all named Erika, and, of course, Steve Carlsberg.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Before we go any further, yes, Cecil is here, too: transcripts of his community radio broadcasts are interspersed throughout the main narrative like an appropriately strange Greek chorus, alternately a pause from, and a driver of, the action.
As for that main story, it revolves around one of the long-running mysteries of the Night Vale podcast: what’s up with The Man in the Tan Jacket? Turns out, a lot, even aside from that deerskin suitcase filled with trained flies. Night Vale has valiantly fought off threats and oddities before, from Desert Bluffs, to StrexCorp, to the periodic atrocities of the librarians. But what happens in these 400 pages is a real doozy, even by Night Vale standards.
Our heroines in this struggle number two: Jackie Fierro, endlessly 19 years old and owner of the local pawnshop; and Diane Crayton, mundane office employee and mother of a teenage shape-shifting son.
One day, The Man in the Tan Jacket enters Jackie’s pawn shop. Instead of giving her an item and receiving the customary $11 and temporary death, the man hands her a piece of paper containing a single phrase: “KING CITY.” Jackie’s unsettled by the interaction, mostly because she has such a hard time remembering the man once he’s gone. Things get more concerning when she realizes the piece of paper won’t leave her hand.
Meanwhile, single mother Diane’s life is also disrupted. She keeps seeing her son’s father, who left Night Vale years earlier. Her son, a typical moody teenager even if he isn’t always humanoid, is eager to reconnect with dad. Diane’s quest to put the puzzle pieces of her life together run smack dab into Jackie’s mission to decipher “KING CITY.” All roads of inquiry seem to lead to that regal municipality, even if no actual road can get you there.
“I will find The Man in the Tan Jacket, and I will make him take this piece of paper back,” Jackie pronounces early on. “If I could do that without having to learn anything about him or about what the paper means, that would be just ideal.”
Sorry, Jackie. Many mysteries go unexplained in Night Vale, but this isn’t one of them. One of the great strengths of podcast has been its consistency, juggling multiple plot threads simultaneously and for long stretches. This novel brilliantly ties loose threads together, allowing itself to live outside the confines of the podcast but also very firmly within its continuum.
We have, up to this point, experienced the supernatural crisis pattern of Night Vale from the outside. For the first time, we are given the accounts from pawns in the grand scheme. The depth this adds to the universe can’t be understated.
“Everything I do is for a reason and I know none of them. Everything makes sense, but the sense is hidden from me,” Diane says. “We live in a patter that we’ll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.”
I can’t tell you much more than that, for fear the Secret Police are even now on my doorstep. But, rest assured, by the end of this novel, one of the podcast’s great questions will be explained. The Man in the Tan Jacket’s motives will be clear. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll have found a place weirder than Night Vale.