Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting's eeriest drama
The new Night Vale books are filled with amazing, insightful forematter and marginalia, the story of each episode annotated by the writers, actors and production crew.
I was privileged to write the introduction to the first volume (Maureen Johnson wrote the intro to book two), and the folks at Harpercollins and Night Vale have kindly given permission for me to reprint it here.
Being weird and funny is easy. Being weird and funny and compelling ishard.
We've all guffawed as some strange, surreal juxtaposition ("Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools"). You don't have to be stoned to crack up at a friend'sfantastic, perfect non-sequitur. Stories that inspire hilarity andmystification are good fun, but they're not great stories.
Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens infiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so theirtriumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of theyogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut-acid this morning isinfinitely more tragic than the "deaths" of Romeo and Juliette. Theyogurt was a alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliette never lived inthe first place.
Stories trick your naive, empathic mind into resonating in sympathy(literally) with the plight of their imaginary people. Usually they dothis by scrupulously avoiding any reminder that these are imaginarypeople. That "willing suspension of disbelief" is a bargain between thecreator and the audience: the creator tells the tale and hews tosomething that is plausible (or at least consistent) and the audiencemember doesn't pinch herself and say, "Cut it out with the quickenedheart, the leaking tears, the smiles of triumph, you dope, this is allmade up!"
This makes weird stories and great stories nearly incompatible. A storyis a love affair on the last night of summer camp that depends on bothparties not calling attention to the fact that the camp bus is coming inthe morning, so they can pretend that the night could last forever.Weird stuff happening to the characters is a reminder that this is allmade up, the ending is coming, and when it's done, these invisiblepeople will disappear into the nonspace whence they came, so stopcheering them on or crying for them.
Bringing me to Night Vale.
The remarkable thing about the people of Night Vale isn't how delightfully weird theyare. The remarkable thing is how moving they are. Cranor and Fink andco-writers and actors weave a world with haphazard internal consistency.When things are weird, they make them weirder. It's a good, meaty sortof weird, steering clear of cliche and venturing into fresh, imaginativeterritory -- but it's still undeniably weird.