Mysterious hooded figures who roam a barricaded dog-park, ten-foot tall angels that change lightbulbs, a five-headed dragon running for mayor (who is accused of insurance fraud), and a floating cat hovering in the men’s bathroom of the local radio station.
Welcome to Night Vale.
To say one listens to a podcast in this day an age carries the stigma of still using VCR tapes or a rotary phone. And yet, Welcome to Night Vale, a bi-monthly podcast produced by Commonplace Books, is anything but outdated.
Since its creation in June of 2012, it has become the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes, surpassing This American Life. The 20 to 30 minute program is a fictional radio show about the goings-on in the desert town of Night Vale. It’s hard to label the podcast as one genre — it incorporates themes from science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and comedy. The radio show covers topics ranging from news, traffic, local events, and the weather, which is actually a few minutes of airing an independent band’s song each episode.
I went to The Booksmith in the Haight last Wednesday night to attend a live reading of one of the episodes. Co-creator Joseph Fink was there, as well as the voice of Night Vale himself, Cecil Baldwin (who shares a name with his character). The bookstore was packed at 10:00 p.m. for its second reading of the night, and the show was incredible — Cecil Baldwin performed along with guest star Mara Wilson as The Faceless Old Woman Who Lives in Your Home. Satellite High sang some spectacularly terrible songs.
The writing of Welcome to Night Vale is phenomenal. The plots of each episode range from a story on the mysterious Glow Cloud, a terrifying cloud of toxic gas that changes color and spews dead animals, becoming the chairman of the PTA, to an investigation for Night Vale Community Radio intern Dana, who got lost lost in a house that does not exist. Each episode is full of detail, yet so much is left to the imagination. It’s almost like a challenge to vision what’s happening as you listen to an episode. The writers are either on acid or way too brilliant for
our time, or both.
The producers have said that Welcome to Night Vale is inspired in many ways by the 19th century writer H.P. Lovecraft, who was a prominent horror writer in the late 1800s. Lovecraft merged science fiction with suspense, and themes from his stories are strongly evident in some episodes. In Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” a luminescent extraterrestrial rock appears in a field, poisoning crops, possessing magical qualities, and puzzling scientists. The tone and rich, dark imagery of his writing is mirrored in the podcast.
Speaking of scientists: what would a compelling, layered story be without a love interest? A beautiful man named Carlos has come to study and run experiments in the strange desert town, and that’s about as much as I can tell you without giving anything away.
Welcome to Night Vale can be downloaded for free on iTunes or streamed at soundcloud.com/nightvaleradio. New episodes come out on the 1st and 15th of every month.
