Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast almost everyone of importance, especially the bacteria that has colonized your eyelids, has heard about. It is a surreal radio drama set within a fictional desert town, a place where the “sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead” while its residents pretend to sleep. As you might have surmised, Welcome to Night Vale walks a narrow space between comedy and horror, frequently switching between the two in the same breath. It is not your average podcast. Here, even angels fear having insufficient bus fare.

Helmed by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale quickly became a phenomenon, placing in numerous best-of lists while accreting universally positive reviews. So popular was the podcast that the creators took it on tour, leaving a trail of sold-out shows in its wake. And then things got even wilder. This year, the creators published a novel by the same name, were invited on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and announced that they would be releasing at least two non-Night Vale podcasts under the “Night Vale Presents” umbrella, which is quite exciting and possibly deadly to the small spiders in your thorax.

But what do you do when two podcasts and two episodes a month are insufficient? Some would suggest consulting with the Faceless Old Woman Who Lives In Your House, but we think you could always benefit from more podcasts of the same genus. Enclosed are five podcasts we enjoyed as fans of Welcome to Night Vale.

SAYER

Eerie and cold, SAYER radiates a more immediate menace than Welcome to Night Vale. The eponymous artificial intelligence speaks in a stately baritone, doling out facts both menial and disconcerting without any real variance in tone. Like Glados in Portal, he’s not terribly invested in your well being—which is a problem, given that he appears to be the main authority on the space station you’ve found yourself upon.

Not that you can do very much about anything. According to the pilot episode, you’re a nameless amnesiac who has been awoken from stasis by the aforementioned artificial intelligence. An employee of Ærolith Dynamics, you’ve also been paralysed for your own good. Lovely. The podcast is currently on its forty-second episode, and appears to be going strong. SAYER, I imagine, would not permit otherwise.

Limetown

Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women, and children mysteriously vanished from a small Tennessee town. Ten years later, a journalist named Lia Haddock, who claims an uncle among the missing, began investigating the tragedy, which quickly unravels into something stranger than even the initial premise suggested.

The podcast is a polished affair, featuring a vast retinue of clean, crisp voices. It plays its subject material surprisingly straight, taking time to build up momentum instead of instantly launching into the weird. You’d be forgiven if you mistook it for Serial, an award-winning podcast that spent its first season deconstructing the circumstances surrounding the murder of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee. But where Serial is rooted in fact, Limetown is (thankfully) entirely fictional.

Spearheaded by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, the fledgling podcast is only in its fourth episode, so it may be worth just bookmarking the website and waiting for the series to be completed before you hit play.

Hidden Almanac

Lighter and vastly more whimsical than the other podcasts named so far, Hidden Almanac features breezy classical music and a slightly nasally narrator named Reverend Mord. Like traditional almanacs, the Hidden Almanac features a hodgepodge of dates and random facts, festivals, and events that likely bear no importance to anyone save for specific locations in distant lands. Unlike traditional almanacs, however, this one deals with more fantastical realities such as asylums for the compassionate treatment of angels and things that piqued the interest of fish.

I’m not a particularly large fan of the narrator, although he does a commendable job at replicating the sonorous soliloquies you hear in churches everywhere. But the creative force behind Hidden Almanac is a positive delight. Ursula Vernon is an acclaimed fiction writer, possibly best known for penning Hugo Award-winning graphic novel Digger and short story Jackalope Wives, which scooped up more awards than any one tale has any right to do.

We’re Alive

No list is complete without a zombie-centric item. We’re Alive is a long-running audio drama about a group of survivors who must, as you might have guessed, secure themselves against the dangers of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. The production values are top-notch, the monologues underpinned by stirrings of ominous music and bolstered by sound effects.

Unfortunately, if understandably, We’re Alive’s primary character is a grizzled-sounding Army Reserve soldier named Michael Cross. The voice actor does an excellent job at portraying toughness, as does the supporting cast. But that may also be We’re Alive’s biggest flaw: it’s a bit too reminiscent of big-budget military zombie movies for my liking. Everyone seems slightly too composed, slightly too calm for their respective environments, but that may only be the consequence of wanting to be coherent for listeners?

Having said that, We’re Alive did amass a formidable audience and the people behind it are working on a spin-off, so there is definitely something special here.

The Black Tapes

Like Limetown, The Black Tapes is yet another podcast that borrows heavily from Serial. However, where the former seems eager to demarcate itself as fiction, The Black Tapes is happy to blur the lines, reading out letters from listeners and inviting their audience to submit stories about their own paranormal experiences. It’s a conceit that works, and one that helps the premise of the podcast.

As the story goes, Alex Reagan is a journalist looking into the research of one Doctor Richard Strand, a sceptic investigating supernatural activities, some of which he’s yet to debunk. Every episode deals with a new mystery, and will have Alex and Richard interviewing related characters and conferring about the data they find. What begins as a seemingly disjointed network of stories soon pulls together and it builds to a rather menacing crescendo. The first season, peppered as it may be with occasional fidelity issues, will haunt your evenings.