Welcome To Night Vale: A Novel - Tapa dura

"This is a splendid, weird, moving novel...It manages beautifully that trick of embracing the surreal in order to underscore and emphasize the real - not as allegory, but as affirmation of emotional truths that don't conform to the neat and tidy boxes in which we're encouraged to house them."--NPR.org

""The book is charming and absurd - think "This American Life" meets "Alice in Wonderland."--Washington Post

"Longtime listeners and newcomers alike are likely to appreciate the ways in which Night Vale, as Fink puts it, "treats the absurd as normal and treats the normal as absurd." What they might not foresee is the emotional wallop the novel delivers in its climactic chapters."--Austin Chronicle

"The hit podcast is absurd and hilarious, and as a book it's similarly entertaining..."--The Guardian

"As a companion piece, "Welcome to Night Vale" will be hard to resist. Though the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town's intersection with an unsuspecting real world, its mysteries - like the richest conspiracy theories - don't exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape."--Detroit Free Press

"The charms of 'Welcome to Night Vale' are nearly impossible to quantify. That applies to the podcast, structured as community radio dispatches from a particularly surreal desert town, as well as this novel, written by the podcast's co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This is the novel of your dreams. . . . A story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys and spring-loaded trap doors of the small town home you'll realize you've always missed living in. When it says 'welcome, ' it's mandatory. You belong here."--Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside

"Welcome To Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to to vivid life. . . . It is as weird and surreal as I hoped it would be, and a surprisingly existential meditation on the nature of time, reality, and the glow cloud that watches over us."--Wil Wheaton

"Take Conan's Hyborea, teleport it to the American Southwest, dress all the warriors in business casual and hide their swords under the floorboards -- that's Night Vale: absurd, magical, wholly engrossing, and always harboring some hidden menace."--John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van

"Emotionally compelling and superbly realized. This seductive, hilarious book unfolds at the moment when certain quiet responsible people find they must risk everything on behalf of love, hope, and understanding. Not a single person who reads this book will be disappointed."--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution and Vacation