So I’m currently reading the Welcome To Night Vale novel, inspired by the brilliant Welcome to Night Vale podcast. What is Welcome to Night Vale? Well, here is what The Awl says because I lack the proper skills to describe it:
“Welcome to Night Vale” is a twice-monthly, 25-ish-minute podcast featuring news, traffic, and weather out of a small town in the Southwestern corner of the United States that does not actually exist. The town’s dog park, which is forbidden, is fictional, as is the mayor, Pamela Winchell, who is probably demonic. The radio show’s host, Cecil Baldwin is real, kind of. One of his most-used words is “void.”
That doesn’t really do the show justice either. I would just say Welcome To Night Vale is insanely bizarre in the most joyous way imaginable. I only finally checked our the podcast last month but immediately fell in love with it. Hence the reading of the novel. Which is the whole point of this post.
It really is a joy to read. There is just so much weird stuff going on. Such as in the photo above. Libraries are described as one of the most dangerous places in Night Vale. Some where to avoid.
Particularly this bit:
“The other option was to go to the public library. Few people came back from a visit to the library. There was one girl a few years ago that survived the Summer Reading Program at the Night Vale Public Library. The girl, Tamika Flynn, defeated the librarian that had imprisoned her and her classmates, using the switchblade hidden in every hardback edition of Eudora Welty’s touching homecoming novel The Optimist’s Daughter.”
The entire book is filled with stuff like that. If you like the absurd, you should check it out.
The Struggling Writer 