Review: Welcome to Night Vale

This is a book about a podcast. It's a great podcast. You should go listen to it. Any episode. It's amazing and you'll love it. It's about life. It's about life in a small town. It's about life in a small town where the sheriff and his secret police keep you and your dog out of the dog park because no one goes to the dog park. You can't go into the dog park. Like for real stop trying.

It's about a small town where the school board holds a lot power but that's mostly because it's run by a large sentient glow cloud that rains blood and dead animals down on the town when angered. ALL HALE THE GLOW CLOUD!

But listen that's the great podcast that shares the name with this book. It's not the book. The book is about that small town and some of the people from that time spend time in both the podcast and the book, but the book is its own thing, and its also excellent. Like the podcast.

It's about family. It's about a family where a single mom is just trying to raise her son. It's about a family who all know that there town is not like most towns, but that's one of the best things about their town. It's about trying to grow up in a single parent home when you can't make decisions well even on the shape you want to take that day. It's about a father who's not around, and that's conspicuous because you keep seeing him around. It's about working a job you don't like, but you have to cause your the only one who knows anything about computers and that's risky and illegal probably.

But like most things I can't adequately describe about this book based on a podcast I can say that you should read it. All of it. Don't skip ahead, or start in the middle like a weirdo. Who does that. Even though you may not be able to relate to the story of a young woman who may or may not be immortal and worked the same job for a real long time, but still feels good about skipping out on high school every day of those thousands of years, you can still relate to these human characters. 

And that's the secret of Night Vale. It's full of the strange and mysterious, but it's also full of people. People you can love and learn from all while doing normal things. Like going to the diner and enjoying some invisible strawberry pie. People are people everywhere. Even in KING CITY, where they are more soupy then you would think. Wait....what was I talking about?

Anyway. Welcome to Night Vale receives five stars out of five.