Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor: Welcome to Night Vale (2015, HarperCollins Publishers)
English language
Published April 30, 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Welcome to Night Vale is as unique in book form as it is in podcast form. If you’re a fan of the show and it’s cast of weird and quirky characters, then you’ll love this.
The authors have done a great job at translating the show’s humor into words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and thereby into a fully formed and engrossing book.
All hail the Glow Cloud!
Where the random weirdness of the podcast works (i.e. some totally crazy thing is just an accepted fact of life in Nightvale), perhaps that doesn't work as well in a full length novel and seems hard to sustain over a few hundred pages. Here, it feels a little confused and repetitious. It also feels like a bit of a slog to get from the beginning to the end of the plot, with a set of main characters who are much less personable than Cecil, Carlos, etc. It becomes a bit of a relief when Cecil pops in with random radio bits to break up the progress of the plot. Well, I enjoyed it but far less than in the little 20 minute podcast bites.
