The Welcome to Night Vale podcast started in 2012. It spawned at book in 2015. Then two more books, It Devours and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in your House. This review is about that first book, Welcome to Night Vale.

I was first introduced to Night Vale a handful of years pre-pandemic via a Sims 3 or 4, I don’t remember which, tumblr. The owner of the tumblr would take pictures in The Sims and add Night Vale quotes to them. I am pretty sure the quotes were from the most recent podcast. At the time this was seriously one of my favourite tumblr accounts. I made a mental note to check out the podcast and read the book. In true form, I became distracted by other books and never got to the podcast because, at knew nothing about podcasts.

Welcome to Night Vale was quite popular all over the internet at the time. It still is. And, like always, I am late to the party. And it’s such a fun and weird party too. I wish I had gotten to this book sooner. This is very accurate description of the podcast applies to the book as well.

There is a metric ton of fan art on the net and you can read anything you want to know about Night Vale and the characters. Especially Cecil, the radio personality, and the Carlos, the perfect scientist (according to Cecil). All I can do is rave about how weird and wonderful the book is.

Night Vale is a city where time doesn’t work. It is a place where librarians are the scariest and most evil things imaginable, angels exist but it is illegal to acknowledge that existence, and lawn flamingos are problematic space-time instruments. It contains a certain kind of weirdness that you are either going to love or hate, and I love it. I wish there were more books this kind of weird in the world.

Two of Night Vale’s citizens come together and go on an adventure in order to save the neighboring King City from Troy. Troy isn’t evil, just an irresponsible asshole. It’s a story about family and friendship and finding yourself. It’s also hysterically weird. If you haven’t read Welcome to Night Vale yet, trust me, you are missing out.