'Welcome to Night Vale' hits the books

For nearly four years, millions of podcast listeners have traveled twice a month to Night Vale, the mysterious desert community where the lines between the supernatural and the mundane tend to blur and fade. This fall, Night Vale comes to the world of literature.

"Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel" masterfully brings the darkly hilarious, touching and creepy world of the "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast into the realm of ink and paper. Written by the series' co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, it will be released Tuesday, Oct. 20, through Harper Perennial.

Since launching in June 2012, the podcast has been downloaded more than 100 million times and hit the road as a traveling live show, logging more than 100 performances in 11 countries and 35 states. While the series — presented in the form of community radio broadcasts by local newscaster Cecil Palmer (played by Cecil Baldwin) — has earned a devout fan base through its Lovecraft-meets-Lake Wobegon storytelling, Fink and Cranor say the novel is equally accessible to neophytes and devotees alike.

“If you know all about our show, if you’ve listened to all of our episodes multiple times you’re going to get new little easter eggs and new understandings that will reward the listening that you’ve done," said Fink. “But we also want it to be a completely satisfying and understandable story, even if you’ve never heard of ‘Night Vale’ before, if in the case of the live show you’ve been brought by a friend or you just had nothing to do that night or with the book if you just walk into the bookstore and pick it up based on Rob Wilson’s really beautiful cover. It’s something that we hope is equally satisfying for both fans and people who have no idea what the podcast is.”

Fink and Cranor will be hitting the road for a book tour in support of the novel. Following Thursday, Oct. 22, at the Kaufman Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, the run of dates also includes Nov. 11 at the First Person Arts Festival at the University of Pennsylvania, Nov. 12 at Greenlight Bookstore at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, and Nov. 17 at Word in Jersey City.

The "Night Vale" novel looks beyond Cecil's radio transmissions, instead opting to tell its stories from a pair of new points-of-view: those of Diane Crayton, a single mother trying to raise a shape-shifting teenage son, and Jackie Fierro, a pawn shop proprietor who has been 19 for as long as she can remember.

“The goal was to explore Night Vale from perspectives that we couldn’t do in the podcast or that we hadn’t already done in the podcast," explained Fink, "because our feeling was that the podcast exists and people still listen to it, so it would have been uninteresting to just re-tell that story. It was more interesting to tell stories that we never would have been able to tell with the podcast.”

Somehow, between posting two new episodes a month and creating a touring live show, Fink and Cranor were able to find time to craft a 416-page novel that gives a deeper look than ever before into the Night Vale mythology (and has a companion audio book narrated by Baldwin and featuring recurring 'Welcome to Night Vale' performer Dylan Marron).

“Deadlines are really useful for a lot of things, but in writing the podcast and writing the book early on, before we even put out our first episode of the podcast, one of the first things we talked about was having a schedule for the podcast," said Cranor. "We’re both big fans of so many audio shows, and one thing that was always frustrating for us was having a podcast you really loved but not knowing when it would come out.

"It just becomes too easy to let your life pass you by and all of these other projects pass you by if you’re not really committed to doing them. So, once somebody says, ‘Hey, this is the deadline to finish the script,’ it makes you get on that deadline so you’re not letting somebody else down, or yourself.”

What's next for "Welcome to Night Vale"? Fink and Cranor haven't dismissed the possibility of endeavors in film or television at some point, but said nothing is set in stone at the moment.

“We’ve gotten all sorts of proposals for all sorts of interesting things, and I think we’re not ruling anything out but also we always want to make sure that anything we do with 'Night Vale' is something we can stand behind and make sure is worthwhile for people to see or hear or whatever," said Fink. "So we’ve been taking things very slowly and making sure that with anything we do with 'Night Vale,' it’s something we can do well.”

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WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: A NOVEL

BY: Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

INFO: Available Tuesday, Oct. 20, as a Harper Perennial Hardcover, $20

ON TOUR

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, Kaufman Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave., New York City, with Cecil Baldwin and moderated by Lev Grossman, $40 to $46

8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11 at the First Person Arts Festival at University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre, 3680 Walnut St., Philadelphia, in conversation with Cecil Baldwin, $19

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12 at Greenlight Bookstore at St. Joseph's College, 245 Clinton Ave., Brooklyn, in conversation with Ashley Ford, $20

7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17 at Word, 123 Newark Ave., Jersey City, in conversation with Maureen Johnson, free standing room admission

ON THE WEB: For tickets, tour dates and more information, visit www.welcometonightvale.com.