by Joseph Fink
The evening turns to night. Soon all of the citizens of Night Vale will disperse back to their homes and hovels and hideaways and witching caves. But for this one evening we all came together. And what are human beings except a coming together? What are we for except to lean into each other? To balance precariously against those around us, a delicate but provocative sculpture.
The Night Vale Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre is over, sure. But what happened within it will always have happened. We lived together, this night, and we always will have.
Harm can come from anything or anyone at any moment, whether a stranger or a loved one or one of those intersections that has poisonous snakes instead of traffic lights. But still we reach out the hand. Still we allow our eyes to meet. Still we hope for the best and try to be the best in return. Because if not, then what else. Because if not, then nothing. A human life is just this. A moment of eye contact in a crowd.
Stay tuned next for tomorrow, by any means necessary.
Good night to every listener here.
And good night, Night Vale. Good night.
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO THE CAST AND CREW OF WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: Meg Bashwiner, Jon Bernstein, Desiree Burch, Nathalie Candel, Adam Cecil, Aliee Chan, Dessa Darling, Felicia Day, Emma Frankland, Kevin R. Free, Mark Gagliardi, Glen David Gold, Angelique Grandone, Marc Evan Jackson, Maureen Johnson, Kate Jones, Ashley Lierman, Erica Livingston, Christopher Loar, Hal Lublin, Dylan Marron, Jasika Nicole, Lauren O’Niell, Zack Parsons, 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, Brie Williams, 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; the Pows; the Zambaranos; Rob Wilson; Kate Leth; Jessica Hayworth; Holly and Jeffrey Rowland; Andrew Morgan; Eleanor McGuinness; Hank Green; John Green; Griffin, Travis, and Justin McElroy; Cory Doctorow; John Darnielle; Aby Wolf; Jason Webley; Danny Schmidt; Carrie Elkin; Eliza Rickman; Mary Epworth; Will Twynham; Erin McKeown; Mal Blum; the New York Neo-Futurists; Janina Matthewson; Christy Gressman; Adam Cecil; Julian Koster; Gennifer Hutchison; Kassie Evashevski; Chris Parnell; Amy Suh; 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 Harper Perennial.
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.
About the Contributors
CECIL BALDWIN is the narrator of the hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale. He is an alumnus of the New York Neo-Futurists, performing in their late-night show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, as well as Drama Desk–nominated The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 2. Cecil has performed at the Shakespeare Theatre DC, Studio Theatre (including the world premiere production of Neil Labute’s Autobahn), the Kennedy Center, the National Players, LaMaMa E.T.C., Emerging Artists Theatre, and the Upright Citizens Brigade. Film/TV credits include Braden in The Outs (Vimeo), the voice of Tad Strange in Gravity Falls (Disney XD), The Fool in Lear (with Paul Sorvino), and Billie Joe Bob. Cecil has been featured on podcasts such as Ask Me Another (NPR), Selected Shorts (PRI), Shipwreck, Big Data, and Our Fair City.
KEVIN R. FREE is a multidisciplinary artist whose work as an actor, writer, director, and producer has been showcased and developed in many places, including The Moth Radio Hour, Project Y Theater, Flux Theater Ensemble, the Queerly Festival (of which he is now the curator), and the Fire This Time Festival, where he served as producing artistic director, winning an Obie for his work in 2015. Recent directing credits include Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill and The Last Five Years (both at Portland Stage) and Topdog/Underdog (University of Arkansas). New York City directing includes the Fire This Time Season 10 World Premiere 10-minute Play Festival; Okello Kelo Sam’s Forged in Fire; Renita L. Martin’s Blue Fire in the Water (Fresh Fruit Festival); The First Time, Standing Up: Bathroom Talk and Other Stuff We Learn from Dad, and Poor Posturing, all by Tracey Conyer Lee; Michelle T. Johnson’s Wiccans in the ’Hood; and Legislative Acts, a sketch comedy show performed by New York City legislators. His full-length plays include Night of the Living N-Word!! (Overall Excellence in Playwriting, FringeNYC 2016); A Raisin in the Salad: Black Plays for White People (New Black Fest Fellowship 2012; Eugene O’Neill Semi-Finalist 2013); Face Value (Henry Street Settlement Playwrights’ Project Grant, 2000); and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, or Triple Consciousness. His webseries, “Gemma & The Bear!,” was an Official Selection of the New York Television Festival in 2016; and his latest webseries, “Beckys through History,” received a creative engagement grant from Lower Manhattan Cultural Center in 2018 (more at www.MyCarl.org). He has worked as an actor across the United States and internationally, most recently appearing in New York City as Michael Curtiz in Reid and Sara Farrington’s Drama Desk–nominated CasblancaBox (HERE)—and as the Narrator of Lisa Clair’s The Making of King Kong (Target Margin Theater). He is an accomplished voice actor as well as having recorded more than three hundred audiobooks, and is the voice of Kevin from Desert Bluffs on Welcome to Night Vale. Twitter: @kevinrfree; www.kevinrfree.com.
MARK GAGLIARDI is an actor and podcaster. He is best known for his narrations on the Comedy Central series Drunk History and for the long-running stage show and podcast The Thrilling Adventure Hour. He grew up in Tennessee, trained at the Theatre School in Chicago, moved to Los Angeles, worked at theme parks, and currently performs on stages and televisions.
JESSICA HAYWORTH is an illustrator and fine artist. She has produced a variety of illustrated works for the Welcome to Night Vale podcast since 2013, including posters for the touring live show. Her other works include the graphic novels Monster and I Will Kill You with My Bare Hands, as well as various solo and group exhibitions. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and lives and works in Detroit.
MAUREEN JOHNSON is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of many YA novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, Suite Scarlett, the Shades of London series, and Truly Devious. She has also done collaborative works, such as Let It Snow (with John Green and Lauren Myracle) and The Bane Chronicles, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, and Ghosts of the Shadow Market (with Cassandra Clare), and How I Resist, a collection to benefit the ACLU. Maureen lives in New York, and online on Twitter (or at www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com).
KATE JONES is a writer, performer, and wedding officiant from Howell, New Jersey. She is an alum of the New York Neo-Futurists and Degenerate Fox (UK). She plays Michelle Nguyen on Welcome to Night Vale and currently lives in Switzerland, where she can often be found performing stand-up comedy, whether or not there is an audience. www.katekatekate.com or @QTPiK8.
ZACK PARSONS is a Chicago-based humorist and author of nonfiction (My Tank is Fight!) and fiction (Liminal States). In addition to Welcome to Night Vale, he has worked with Joseph Fink on the website Something Awful and can also be found writing for his own site, The Bad Guys Win (thebadguyswin.com). You can call him a weird idiot on Twitter at @sexyfacts4u.
JONNY SUN is the author and illustrator of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too (HarperPerennial, 2017) and the New York Times bestselling illustrator of Gmorning, Gnight! by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Penguin Random House, 2018). He is currently a writer for the Netflix Original Series BoJack Horseman, and is writing the animated feature Paper Lanterns, based on an original idea of his, for 20th Century Fox and Chernin Productions. Tweeting as @jonnysun, he was named one of Time magazine�
�s 25 Most Influential People on the Internet of 2017. As a doctoral candidate at MIT, an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and a creative researcher at the Harvard metaLAB, he studies social media, virtual place, and online community. As a playwright, Jonathan’s work has been performed at the Yale School of Drama, Factory Theater in Toronto, Hart House Theater, and Theater Lab in Toronto. As an artist and illustrator, his work has been exhibited at MIT, the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven ArtSpace, and the University of Toronto. He previously studied as an architect (M.Arch., Yale) and engineer (B.A.Sc., University of Toronto). He is the creator of @tinycarebot and the cocreator of the MIT Humor Series. His comedic work has appeared in Time, BuzzFeed, Playboy, GQ , and McSweeney’s. Recently, he was profiled on NPR and in the New York Times, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2019.
Praise for Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
“This is a splendid, weird, moving novel about families, the difficulties of growing up, and the deep-seated vulnerabilities involved in raising children. 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
“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
“Fink and Cranor’s prose hints there’s an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations. . . . The book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town’s intersection with an unsuspecting real world.”
—Los Angeles Times
“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.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“The book is charming and absurd—think This American Life meets Alice in Wonderland.”
—Washington Post
Praise for It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel
“Different from other mystery novels . . . as captivating and light as any mystery novel can be but explores one of the most complex issues: the conflict between science and reason on the one hand and, on the other hand, religion and cult.”
—Washington BookReview
“Compelling. . . . A confident supernatural comedy from writers who can turn from laughter to tears on a dime.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“(A) smart exploration of the divide—and overlap—of science and religion. . . . A thrilling adventure and a fascinating argument that science and belief aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”
—Tor.com
“Very clever. . . . With a gripping mystery, a very smartly built world (a place similar to our own world but at the same time distinctly other), and a cast of offbeat characters, the novel is a welcome addition.”
—Booklist
“A mysterious, must-read exploration of the Great Unknowns, with a touch of Carl Sagan and Agatha Christie.”
—Marisha Pessl, New York Times–bestselling author of Night Film and Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Also by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
It Devours! A Welcome to Night Vale 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
The Buying of Lot 37: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 3
Also by Joseph Fink
Alice Isn’t Dead: A Novel
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s 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.
WHO’S A GOOD BOY?. Copyright © 2019 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, downloaded, 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 by Milan Bozic
Cover and interior illustrations by Jessica Hayworth
Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-279812-1
Version 04162019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279811-4
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*The Oklahoma City 89ers (presently named the Oklahoma City Dodgers) are a Triple-A minor league team which is, according to Wikipedia, inexplicably in the “Pacific Coast” League.