Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor

​This was some sort of mad wizard thing, wasn’t it? Well, wizards, plural, co-authored into existence out of a podcast and mind-bogglingly original, inventive, and exciting, Night Vale is one literary destination you do not want to miss.
It’s a town unlike any other that exists in accordance to its own wildly bizarre rules. Then again, most places have bizarre rules. Night Vale is just…odder than most.
In this town, a pawn shop owner stuck at age 19 gets an unusual item: a paper with two words written on it. It seems like a place name only it’s a place she has never heard of and seemingly no one else has either. The paper stubbornly refuses to leave her possession and so she sets off to investigate the existence of this other place, enlisting the assistance of another local, a woman with a shapeshifting teenage son.
None of the things in the paragraph above are actually the oddest things about Night Vale, but it’ll give you the idea.
There’s so much to like here, there’s so much to LOVE here. It’s clever, completely unique, and wryly darkly humorous in all the right ways. There’s a mystery, well, there are lots of mysteries, really.
The strangest most interesting characters; the strangest most interesting places.
I’d read and enjoyed Fink’s Alice Isn’t Dead before, so I knew to expect good things and yet this book still managed to impress.
It was certainly helped by the fact that it marked my return to audiobooks after a couple of years away. The narrator did such a great job with it, getting the sardonic cheeky tone of it just right. It’s atmospheric, immersive, it completely draws you in and, while Night Vale might not be a place you might wish to visit in person, in literary form it’s an absolute must see. Loved it. You might to. Dare to believe in mountains. Recommended.