Welcome to Night Vale is not only one of the biggest success stories for the podcasting era, it’s also one of the strangest. When Night Vale creator and co-writer Joseph Fink began posting the biweekly, half-hour fictional show online, no one paid any attention to it. Today, it’s been downloaded over 100m times. On the iTunes charts, it regularly outperforms This American Life. It is successful enough to sell merchandise, live tours and now, apparently, a novel of the same name, co-written by Fink and his writing partner, Jeffrey Cranor.

The premise of Night Vale is that you, the listener, have tuned into the community announcements of a rural radio station in the American south-west. Except this community isn’t like any other. As your host Cecil Palmer (voiced by the actor Cecil Baldwin) ticks off the week’s goings on, you realize that you are in a place where every conspiracy theory is true, and creatures and concepts from cosmic horror shape day-to-day events. The city council may be immortal and at the very least certainly isn’t human. Interns at the radio station have a habit of dying under sinister circumstances. The town’s dog park, possibly an alternate dimension in and of itself, is patrolled by mysterious hooded figures. The sheriff’s secret police announces a search for local resident Hiram McDaniels, who turns out to be a six-meter tall, five-headed dragon. Later, he runs for mayor. (He loses.)

While transcripts of Cecil’s radio show appear from time to time in the novel, the book instead focuses on the misadventures of two very different Night Vale denizens whose paths end up crossing as they investigate a great conspiracy. Jackie Fierro – the local pawn shop owner, who has been stuck at the age of 19 for some time – is given a piece of paper marked KING CITY that she cannot get rid of no matter how hard she tries. Meanwhile, PTA treasurer Diane Clayton’s son Josh is a teenager and shapeshifter who has recently grown interested in his estranged father. Their quests may involve leaving Night Vale, but doing so is harder than it looks and puts them on a collision course with dark forces, invisible pie and possibly evil lawn flamingoes.

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There’s a rich tradition in American humour – and in particular of the New York and San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and 70s – of mining conspiracy theories for zany jokes. The short lived comic Cover-Up Lowdown – narrated by an eyeball in a trench coat – synthesized and mocked various strains of late 60s paranoia, and included quizzes you could take to find out if you personally shot JFK. Counterculture newspapers like the East Village Other (imagine an even more rebellious Village Voice staffed by writers like Robert Crumb and Ishmael Reed) regularly featured fake reports of shadowy cabals and charts diagramming conspiracies that included organisations like “the combine” and “the combine’s fog machine”.

Out of this countercultural moment grew at least one influential parody religion, Discordianism – dedicated to the promulgation of a gleeful brand of yippie chaos. As articulated in The Principia Discordia, the “Pentabarf” or Five Commandments of Discordianism, include that Discordians must eat a hot dog every Friday (wheat is forbidden in Nightvale). This movement, too, gave birth to a novel: Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, whose bewildering plot involves everything from psychic dolphins to a grassy knoll so crowded with assassins that no one is quite sure who actually got the shot off that killed Kennedy.

Welcome to Night Vale ditches the sex and hallucinogens, marrying the rest with a madcap deadpan familiar to readers of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. As with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the Discworld novels, Night Vale’s humour is rooted less in witty dialogue and more in taking the silliest and most bizarre world-building ideas from its genre, inflicting them on everyday people and archly relating the results. (You can hear all these influences come together to great effect in Night Vale’s beloved second episode, Glow Cloud.)

Within the confines of a book – or 30 minutes of podcast on your morning commute – the tightrope act of crafting an absurd world whose characters and story we’re meant to care about can be thrilling and hilarious. But Welcome to Night Vale now has more episodes than most television programs, and shows no sign of slowing down. Listening to the whole melonfarming thing will take you much longer than listening to any work of Dickens. While its legions of hard won fans clearly have the patience for it, it’s unclear to me that what the show does is sustainable at this length. There’s a repetitive, numbing quality to Night Vale’s humor after a few episodes. Whenever a seeming innocuous announcement begins, you know that some shadowy cabal or creature more at home in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual will show up in the punch line.

Sometimes, these jokes are wildly inventive, especially when they play off typical newsy sentence constructions. In one episode people are “surprised” when the president of a university releases a public statement, not because of its content, but because the president is a sentient rock and thus lacks the ability to speak (it turns out she’s telepathic). Often, however, the punchlines are predictable. When Cecil tells us that dog adoption day is coming up, you know a list of silly-but-menacing dog breeds is to come. When he tells us that the Night Vale boy scouts have adopted a new ranking system, it’s not exactly unexpected that these include the ranks of Blood Pact Scout, Dreadnaught Scout and Eternal Scout.

And as Night Vale grows more narratively ambitious, its problems become more pronounced. The secret ingredient to Adams and Pratchett’s work isn’t oddball conceits or unexpected jokes, but rather compelling, memorable characters. We want to follow Rincewind the cowardly wizard, or middle class every-nebbish Arthur Dent as they try to navigate their respective absurd and dangerous worlds. The thinness of Night Vale’s characters is actually one of its running gags, with various denizens of the town referred to as Intern Dana, Carlos, The Scientist and John Peters, you know, The Farmer? Unfortunately, the self-consciousness doesn’t make up for the flatness on its own.

Its central figure and narrator, Cecil, is also confusingly drawn. As written in the show, he’s a panglossian innocent, naively assuming that Night Vale’s various authority figures have its best interests at heart. He’s truly shocked and bewildered in the moments when he discovers they do not. Baldwin often voices him, however, with the menacing stentorian drawl of Vincent Price guesting on the bridge of Thriller. The combination of innocence and menace never quite works.

Night Vale is instantly compelling because its form allows it to both use and satirize the tropes of cosmic horror, the subgenre pioneered by HP Lovecraft in which ineffable, alien horrors break through the thin delusion we call human perception with nasty results. Cosmic horror may be ultimately incompatible with Night Vale’s aims, however. Cosmic horror is the realm not only of the unspoken, but the unspeakable; not only the invisible, but that which we refuse to see. It works by drawing out our unspoken anxieties and giving them monstrous form. Unlike science fiction and fantasy, the entire genre exists in opposition to the kind of normalisation on which Night Vale depends, which may be why many of its most important foundational texts are short stories. Humanity cannot survive Lovecraft’s nightmare landscapes with its sanity intact. Thomas Ligotti thinks that life is a curse.

Yet, as Night Vale’s narrative gets more elaborate and ambitious, its real unanswered question becomes not what are the town’s secrets, but how could anything survive in this world at all? Welcome to Night Vale’s efforts to can the uncanny are entertaining, but they don’t leave the listener truly invested in its story, or wondering about the dark mysteries the universe holds.