Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, the creators of the wildly successful podcast Welcome to Night Vale, have written a novel set in the same bizarre universe! Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel will be published by Harper Perennial on October 20, 2015. Today, they’ve revealed the cover, designed by Rob Wilson, who also created the show’s logo.
Is that just a pretty representation of the town of Night Vale, or a mysterious message written in Morse code?
Readers need not be caught up on WTNV to enjoy the book, Fink said on Twitter. When he first announced the book on the podcast, he explained that it would be “a brand-new story that explores parts of Night Vale that we just haven’t been able to get into with the podcast.” The synopsis certainly matches that:
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 she’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.
Plus, good news for listeners who are used to experiencing the world of Night Vale between their ears: Cecil Baldwin will narrate the audiobook, also out in October.
You can preorder both the physical book and the audiobook now!
