Welcome to Night Vale (Hörbuch)

OK, disclosure: I'm a fan of the podcast. Welcome to Night Vale, as delivered in half-hour installments twice a month, is (or at least was for a very long time) exceedingly clever and enjoyable: brief little glimpses into a town where "normal" doesn't have its normal definition, where Lovecraftian terrors and government conspiracies and alien incursions and ghosts and yougetthepicture are all a part of everyday life, all of it delivered by the unfailingly cheerful local radio host. It's not only fun (and at times creepy), but also a show with pathos, and the Buffy fan in me always loved how the whole little city becomes a playground to hash out various social issues without ever having to comment on them directly.

But what works over 30 minutes doesn't necessarily work over 400 pages, even if delivered as an audiobook. There are a couple of reasons for this; first of all, of course, the novel can't actually interfere too much with the main plot of the podcast, so aside from a few cameos most of the regular characters are reduced to background characters while the novel develops a standalone plot that's... not bad, just not nearly complex enough to warrant the running time when the show regularly resolves similar plots over a music break. There's also the narration; on the show, the whole thing is narrated by Cecil, who's a bit of an odd character. The book follows the same narrative style, even though Cecil himself only pops up occasionally.

But above all, the main problem is that issue of "normalcy", whatever that means. 3+ years into Welcome to Night Vale, we know all the jokes, we know all the usual twists, we know all the weird places in town. The novel could have told us something new about them, turned a few things inside out; instead it plays it safe, mostly just repeats things that its core audience has already heard a hundred times. It's not that those are bad; there's just very little reason to read the novel rather than just go back and listen to an episode or two. If you do, though, get the audiobook.