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Welcome to Night Vale cover art

Welcome to Night Vale

Written by: Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor
Narrated by: Cecil Baldwin, Dylan Marron, Retta, Thérèse Plummer, Dan Bittner
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Publisher's Summary

Performed by Welcome to Night Vale podcast narrator Cecil Baldwin and special guests Dylan Marron, Retta, Thérèse Plummer, and Dan Bittner, with music by Disparition.

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...no matter where we live.

"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)

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 deerskin 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.

©2015 Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers

What the critics say

"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)

"Audio is THE way to experience the Night Vale novel.... For fans, it's a must-listen." ( AudioFile)

Editorial Review

A deep and gloomy setting, a dark and twisting tale, and an array of unusual, not strictly human characters weaving their way through it all: Welcome to Night Vale.

Dive headfirst into this dark and mysterious audiobook full of suspense, horror, paranoia, and magic. Welcome to Night Vale merges ghouls, ghosts, shape-shifters, aliens, angels, and government conspiracies in a mystical tale of two converging mysteries. Night Vale, a fictional town in Southwest USA, is the anchoring point for a swirl of characters and strange occurrences that whirl in and out of the narrative, sometimes passing each other by, and sometimes colliding.

The novel takes its inspiration from a well loved podcast by the same name and same creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Its main story centres around two women, 19-year-old pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro and PTA treasurer Diane Crayton, as they navigate unfolding mysteries and ghosts of the past. Both a gripping tale of suspense and a tour de force of surrealism and satire, Welcome to Night Vale will pull you deep into its world, and may never fully let you go.

Podcast narrator Cecil Baldwin and a full cast of performers lend their voices to the audiobook, accompanied by original music to set the mood and tone. The result is a rich, immersive experience, plunging the listener in the mystical world. An unmissable and unpausable tale, Welcome to Night Vale is sure to enthral any lover of mystery and magic.

What listeners say about Welcome to Night Vale

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From a fan of Welcome to Nightvale

This is a biased review from a person who has listened to a lot of Welcome to Nightvale before listening to this book, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

This book, in my opinion, was amazing. It had ne hooked from start to finish, and left me with thorough mental images of the happenings of what was going on through the story, as if the words warped from just sound to an genuine reality, almost touchable from the unknowable distance.

Having the actual voice of Nightvale, Cecil Baldwin (And the other character voices on this audio book), added a depth to the story that would be hard to capture any other way you would attempt to digest this read, and breathed life into the world within the book.

I may be biased, but I would still attempt to recommend this audio book and the book itself to people if I was asked to recommend a fiction. To those who have read this novel, I would recommend the audio book to enhance and enrich the story that they are already familiar with. It is worth the time, and the money, to listen to this audio book.

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Esoteric, and Enrapturing

Unsurprisingly Night Vale, this book is exactly like an extended and more fleshed out episode of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, it's oddities and wholesome view of the world we can never understand come, as they say, with the amorphous ungulate.

If you are a fan of the show you will find nothing but grade A material, wonderful performances, and great characters. If Night Vale is not your favorite thing, but you still enjoy it you may find the novel's more linear, coherent, and focused narrative more to your liking.

The Story is intriguing, and well written, the performance is spot on and the world is as rich, and as riddled with the strange and unusual as it always is. Cannot recommend this book to Night Vale fans enough!

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3 people found this helpful

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Weird at its best

Huge fan of the podcast and this didn't disappoint. If you like word storytelling set in a fun and horrorish way. This is right up your alley.

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Just what I needed in a chaotic time

I'm a pretty straight thinker. Well, my thoughts are straight enough from my perspective and probably awkwardly angled from anyone else's, and probably multi-coloured. At least I hope so. Anyways.... this provided me an amazing break from serious thinking and general rigidity. like a breath of fresh air. Story gets a bit convoluted but if you know the subject matter that won't surprise you.

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A story of wonder and mystery! defiantly worth It!

if you're the type of person who loves Dr who or a strange fiction set in a world that seems to odd to be true, then you'll love this book! Hard a great time getting to know the residence of night vale and their peculiar town, every chapter was another addition to an every expanding world of wonder. defiantly pick this title up!

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loved it!

I have been listening to Nightvale radio since 2012 and I have loved it all that time. I wanted to get the audio book right when it came out but that wasn't possible at the time. I was finally able to get it and it was as wonderful as I had hoped. Cecil Baldwin's performance was as masterful as expected and I can't think of any better way to experience this novel than through his narration.

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Wonderful book, from a wonderful universe!

Any fan of the podcast would love this book, though most of the book has an omnipresent narrator, instead of Cecil Palmer, though there are Cecil Palmer broadcast smattered throughout. Cecil Balwin, as always, does an excellent job of narrating, both as Palmer and omnipresently. ;)

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As a new fan of Night Vale I really loved it.

With the amazing voice of Cecil and the amazing strange stories about the people of Night Vale, how can you go wrong?

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    3 out of 5 stars
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like Douglas Adams but unfunny

Now there's nothing to agregous with this book. I enjoyed the characters and how they interacted with each other. It also set up some intresting mysterys that got me through the story. But the big flaw with this book is randomness for the sake of randomness. It likes to set up out there concepts for humor but ultimately ends up doing nothing with it but point at it a go "isn't that random" before moving having not told an actual joke. This sometimes works to its detriment when it will actually contradict parts of the plot just to create a joke that lands flat.

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New Podcast Fan!

I recently had listened to a few podcast episodes as an introduction and when I saw there was a book, I knew it would be something special. I wasn't disappointed. Oddly unsettling and oddly relatable, the story builds so well. As someone who doesn't know the lore of the Podcast, my several ears were delighted by the balance between the bizarre, and the relatable.

It's never scary, just oddly creepy in the best way possible. Masterfully Written and Narrated, this is a must have for your Halloween collection!

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