by Joseph Fink
Be cruel or kind. Reveal more than you should. Tell them anything you like.
It doesn’t matter. They won’t believe you anyway.
WANT MORE NIGHT VALE?
This is the end of the book. “It Devours!? Oh yeah, I’ve read that book” is now a thing you can say to friends, or even to complete strangers on the street, as those strangers try to ignore your sudden unprompted assertion about a book you once read.
If you enjoyed this novel, we recommend you join us in our ongoing Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which has been telling stories about this strange desert town since 2012.
Our podcast comes out twice monthly online and is completely free. You can download it to your computer or listening device through iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, YouTube, any of the hundreds of free podcasting apps, or by going to welcometonightvale.com.
All of the episodes going back to the very start are available to download right now. Or if that sounds like too much time investment, just hop right in wherever we are now. You’ll be in the swing of things in no time. Well, some time. It will take longer than zero time.
Interested in more stories from us? Visit www.nightvale presents.com to listen to Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires, new serial fiction podcasts from the team behind Welcome to Night Vale, plus a bunch of other new podcasts we are making with artists we love. Check back regularly to see what’s launching.
We also do live shows all over the world (more than two hundred shows in sixteen different countries at the time of this writing). These live shows are full evenings of Night Vale storytelling, with live music and guest stars, designed so that you do not need to know anything about the podcast or novel to enjoy.
Keep an eye on welcometonightvale.com to join us next time we pass through wherever you live. (Wherever you live is our favorite place to perform.)
See you there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the cast and crew of Welcome to Night Vale: Meg Bashwiner, Jon Bernstein, Desiree Burch, Adam Cecil, Felicia Day, Emma Frankland, Kevin R. Free, Mark Gagliardi, Angelique Grandone, Marc Evan Jackson, Maureen Johnson, Kate Jones, Erica Livingston, Christopher Loar, Hal Lublin, Dylan Marron, Jasika Nicole, Lauren O’Niell, Flor De Liz Perez, Teresa Piscioneri, Jackson Publick, Molly Quinn, Em Reaves, Retta, Symphony Sanders, Annie Savage, Lauren Sharpe, James Urbaniak, Bettina Warshaw, Wil Wheaton, Mara Wilson, and, of course, the voice of Night Vale himself, Cecil Baldwin.
Also and always: Jillian Sweeney; Kathy and Ron Fink; Ellen Flood; Leann Sweeney; Jack and Lydia Bashwiner; Anna, Levi, and Caleb Pow; Kate and Derek Zambarano; Rob Wilson; Kate Leth; Jessica Hayworth; Holly and Jeffrey Rowland; Zack Parsons; Ashley Lierman; Glen David Gold; Andrew Morgan; Eleanor McGuinness; Hank Green; John Green; Patrick Rothfuss; Cory Doctorow; John Darnielle; Dessa Darling; Aby Wolf; Jason Webley; Danny Schmidt; Carrie Elkin; Eliza Rickman; Mary Epworth; Will Twynham; Erin McKeown; the New York Neo-Futurists; Laura Brown; Janina Matthewson; Christy Gressman; Julian Koster; Gennifer Hutchison; Kassie Evashevski; Katharine Heller; Brie Williams; Dr. Rudy Busto, who first got Joseph interested in the intersection of science fiction and religion; the Booksmith in San Francisco; and, of course, the delightful Night Vale fans.
Our agent, Jodi Reamer; our editor, Amy Baker; and all the good people at HarperPerennial.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOSEPH FINK created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts. He lives with his wife in New York.
JEFFREY CRANOR cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also cocreates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: A NOVEL
“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
“Fink and Cranor’s prose hints there’s an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations. . . . 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, Night Vale’s mysteries—like the richest conspiracy theories—don’t exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape.”
—Los Angeles Times
“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
“Welcome to Night Vale lives up to the podcast hype in every way. It is a singularly inventive visit to an otherworldly town that’s the stuff of nightmares and daydreams.”
—BookPage
“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.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel masterfully brings the darkly hilarious, touching, and creepy world of the podcast into the realm of ink and paper.”
—Asbury Park Press
“A marvelous book. It’s a book that manages to have a real plot—about children and their relationship to their parents, and about parents and their relationship to the world their children are growing up in. . . . Like the podcast, the novel is full of people we love and root for, full of frightening things, and full of dramatic tension that pays off beautifully with resolutions worthy of any great tale of traditional conflict.”
—Boing Boing
“A wonderfully creepy tale filled with revelations about the nature of the town and its residents.”
—A.V. Club
“This is the kind of book that’ll make you say ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD. Whether you’re a fan of the strange and upsetting Welcome to Night Vale podcast or you’re new to Night Vale and its quaint desert conspiracies, it’s never a bad time to visit Night Vale.”
—Bustle
“Fans will find it refreshing to see Night Vale from different perspectives . . . but knowledge of the podcast isn’t required to follow the story. This unusual experiment in format-shifting works surprisingly well.”
—Publishers Weekly
“All hail the glow cloud as the weird and wonderful town of Night Vale brings itself to fine literature. . . . The novel is definitely as addictive as its source material.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Take Conan’s Hyboria, 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, New York Times bestselling author of Universal Harvest and Wolf in White Van
“They’ve done the unthinkable: merged the high weirdness and intense drama of Night Vale to the pages of a novel that is even weirder, even more intense than the podcast.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and coeditor of Boing Boing
“This is the novel of your dreams, a hypnotic travelogue that shimmers and changes as you read. A friendly (but terrifying) and comic (but dark) and glittering (but bleak) story of misfit family life that unfolds along the side streets, back alleys, and spring-loaded trapdoors 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
“This small town full of hooded figures, glowing clouds, cryptically terrifying public policies, and flickering realities quickly feels more like home than home. You will want to live in Night Vale, even if that means you might be taken off in an unmarked helicopter or cross into a parallel universe by accident. There is nothing like Night Vale, in the best possible way.”
—Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Name of the Star
“Brilliant, hilarious, and wondrously strange. I’m packing up and moving to Night Vale!”
—Ransom Riggs, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
“I’ve been a fan of Welcome to Night Vale for years, and in that time writers Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have delighted me with stories that are clever, twisted, beautiful, strange, wonderful, and sweet. This book does all of that and so much more. It’s even better than I’d hoped. I think this might be the best book I’ve read in years.”
—Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind
“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
“Welcome to Night Vale brings its eponymous desert town to vivid life. Those of us who have gotten to know Night Vale through Cecil Palmer’s biweekly radio broadcasts can finally see what it’s like to actually live there. 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. ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD.”
—Wil Wheaton
ALSO BY JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR
Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 1
The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
IT DEVOURS! Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design and illustration by Rob Wilson
Title page design by Rob Wilson
Illustrations by Jessica Hayworth
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-247608-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-247605-0 (hardcover)
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