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by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor
Co-creators of the popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast, successfully expand the mythology of their strange desert town.
Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.
Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked "KING CITY" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.
Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton's son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane's started to see her son's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.
Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: "KING CITY". It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures...if they can ever find it.
"Starred Review. A fantastic addition with a stand-alone tale of the mysterious desert town that also offers loyal listeners some interesting clues about the nature of the place." - Kirkus
"Co-creators of the popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast, successfully expand the mythology of their strange desert town. Fans will find it refreshing to see Night Vale from different perspectives ... but knowledge of the podcast isn't required to follow the story." - Publishers Weekly
"Fans of the podcast will enjoy learning more Night Vale lore, and fantasy readers may also enjoy, depending on how tolerant they are of non sequiturs. Others, though, may not find enough to sustain a novel of this length." - Library Journal
"Sporting all of Night Vale's oddities with the podcast's trademark nonchalance, this debut is bound to please the podcast's fans, but newcomers may want to take a listen first to avoid missing the inside jokes." - Booklist
"Hypnotic and darkly funny... Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in." - The Guardian (UK)
"Take Conan's Hyborea, 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
"Welcome To Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to to vivid life. ... 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
"Brilliant, hilarious, and wondrously strange. I'm packing up and moving to Night Vale!" - Ransom Riggs, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
"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 co-editor of Boing Boing
"Emotionally compelling and superbly realized. This seductive, hilarious book unfolds at the moment when certain quiet responsible people find they must risk everything on behalf of love, hope, and understanding. Not a single person who reads this book will be disappointed." - Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution and Vacation
"This is the novel of your dreams... A story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys and spring-loaded trap doors of the small town home you'll realize you've always missed living in. When it says 'welcome,' it's mandatory. You belong here." - Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside
This information about Welcome to Night Vale was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joseph Fink created and co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and touring live show. In his mid-twenties he started Commonplace Books, a very small publishing company, producing two collections of short works which he edited and laid out at his office job when his boss wasn't looking. Later Jeffrey approached Joseph with the idea of writing a play about time travel. They co-wrote and performed this play in the East Village in August of 2011. Soon afterwards, Joseph started brainstorming a new project he and Jeffrey could co-write and this led to the pilot episode of Welcome to Night Vale. He is from California but doesn't live there anymore.
Jeffrey Cranor co-writes - along with Joseph Fink - the hit podcast and touring live show Welcome to Night Vale. He also makes theater and dance. He has written more than 100 short plays with the New York Neo-Futurists, co-wrote and co-performed a two-man show (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us) with Joseph, and collaborated with choreographer (also wife) Jillian Sweeney to create three full-length dance pieces: Imaginary Lines, This could be it., and Vulture-Wally. Jeffrey lives in New York State.
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