English language
Published April 29, 2017 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves--now available as a paperback.Welcome to Night Vale ... a friendly desert community somewhere in the American Southwest. It's a town like your town, with a city hall, a bowling alley, a diner, a supermarket, and a community radio station reporting all the news that's allowed to be heard. In this ordinary little town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are commonplace parts of everyday life, the lives of two women, with two mysteries, are about to converge.
Like all of Night Vale, pawn shop proprietor Jackie Fierro abides by routine. But a crack appears in the standard order of her perpetually-nineteen-year-old life when a mysterious man in a tan jacket gives her …
From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves--now available as a paperback.Welcome to Night Vale ... a friendly desert community somewhere in the American Southwest. It's a town like your town, with a city hall, a bowling alley, a diner, a supermarket, and a community radio station reporting all the news that's allowed to be heard. In this ordinary little town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are commonplace parts of everyday life, the lives of two women, with two mysteries, are about to converge.
Like all of Night Vale, pawn shop proprietor Jackie Fierro abides by routine. But a crack appears in the standard order of her perpetually-nineteen-year-old life when a mysterious man in a tan jacket gives her a slip of paper marked by two pencil-smudged words: KING CITY. Everything about the man unsettles her, especially the paper that she cannot remove from her hand. Yet when Jackie puts her life on hold to search for the man, no one who meets him can seem to remember anything about him.
Diane Crayton 's fifteen-year-old son, Josh, is moody and a shape shifter. Lately, Diane has started to see the boy's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as he did the day he left when they were teenagers. Josh is growing ever more curious about his estranged father-leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, but is helpless to prevent.
Propelled by two words--KING CITY--Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search to reclaim her routine life draw them increasingly closer to one another, and to this place that may hold the key to their mysteries and their futures ... if they can ever find it.
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.
