{"id":2172,"date":"2015-11-03T22:21:20","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T03:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/?p=2172"},"modified":"2024-01-21T11:30:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:30:46","slug":"fink-joseph-jeffrey-cranor-welcome-to-night-vale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2015\/11\/fink-joseph-jeffrey-cranor-welcome-to-night-vale\/","title":{"rendered":"Fink, Joseph & Jeffrey Cranor: Welcome to Night Vale<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I tried both listening and reading to Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel<\/cite>, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor<\/strong>, which may have been my mistake. You see, I’m very picky about what\u00a0audiobooks I listen to, because many books are\u00a0just too slow out loud for my\u00a0tastes. But I’d listened to the first chapter that was released as an extra on the podcast, and in general I’m just so used to Night Vale as an audio-first experience that I decided to give it a try.<\/p>\n

I believe I got to about chapter 8 before I gave up, because it was just not working for me: as a novel, it’s far longer and slower than the podcast, naturally, and\u00a0my mind was drifting far too much while I was driving. This is nothing against Cecil Baldwin’s performance as a narrator,\u00a0which is excellent as always; it’s just not what works for me in audio.<\/p>\n

But this may have carried over into my\u00a0experience of the book, which basically felt like a whole lot of waiting for things to happen. And I genuinely have no idea how fair\u00a0an assessment this is, because I tried to re-read once I knew the ending, to see the whole shape, and I couldn’t make myself do it; I kept\u00a0checking\u00a0social media and playing silly games instead, before I gave up and reminded myself this wasn’t homework, it was supposed to be enjoyable.<\/p>\n

(Oh, another thing that\u00a0didn’t dispose me well toward the book, which I think can be reasonably laid at the feet of\u00a0its creators: the\u00a0podcast episode that was released immediately\u00a0before<\/em> the novel was available was called “An Epilogue,” and opens thusly (via<\/a>):<\/p>\n

The last couple weeks, as we all know, have been eventful ones. I\u2019m not going to go over everything again \u2013 we all know what happened. We are well read, well informed people who have paid attention to the whole recent \u201cKING CITY\u201d affair. We know about the terrible ordeals that Diane Crayton and Jackie Fierro endured. We know how their troubles all ended up. And we know the truth about The Man in the Tan Jacket. We know\u00a0all<\/i> about him now, because of what Diane and Jackie found out. So I won\u2019t go over all of that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which\u00a0is (a) not how people\u00a0talk<\/em>\u00a0— commit to your framing device, damn it —\u00a0and (b) the kind of thing that makes me want to say “Yes, you’re very smart. Shut up,” like\u00a0Peter Falk in\u00a0The\u00a0Princess Bride<\/em>. And the whole episode is like that, nothing happening but blatant teasers for the novel.)<\/p>\n

So\u00a0I was grumpy and felt like things were moving\u00a0slowly when I shifted to\u00a0reading; would the free-floating omni POV\u00a0and expository prose have gotten on my nerves without that? For instance:<\/p>\n

Josh sometimes appears human. When he does, he is often short, chubby-cheeked, pudgy, wearing glasses.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that how you see yourself, Josh?\u201d Diane [his mother] once asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes,\u201d Josh replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you like the way you look?\u201d Diane once followed up.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes,\u201d Josh replied.<\/p>\n

Diane did not press Josh further. She felt his terse answers were a sign he did not want to talk much.<\/p>\n

Josh wished his mother talked to him more. His short answers were a sign he didn\u2019t know how to socialize well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similarly,\u00a0was I\u00a0discounting\u00a0character development because of my mood, and failing to give enough slack to the need to establish location and worldbuilding\u00a0for new readers, just because I already knew it? Would I have found charming and in-character the chapter that’s just a Carlos monologue, if I weren’t in the mood to say “ugh, that’s just an excuse to give Dylan Marron a speech for the audiobook?” I can’t say.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0can\u00a0recognize that some of the book’s themes are\u00a0laudable, even if I can’t make myself care about them. And I\u00a0did\u00a0enjoy\u00a0some of the small touches, particularly\u00a0the house’s\u00a0thoughts and\u00a0the man in the\u00a0gray pin-striped business suit. Further,\u00a0other podcast fans like this just fine–see, for instance, Amal El-Mohtar at NPR<\/a>–so it can’t only be a book for\u00a0readers new to Night Vale. But fairly or unfairly,\u00a0it just wasn’t for me.<\/p>\n

(Oh, and if you’re new to Night Vale and\u00a0are arachnophobic, you want to avoid\u00a0the book and podcast both.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I tried both listening and reading to Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which may have been my mistake. You see, I’m very picky about what\u00a0audiobooks I listen to, because many books are\u00a0just too slow out loud for my\u00a0tastes. But I’d listened to the first chapter that was released … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fink, Joseph & Jeffrey Cranor: Welcome to Night Vale<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15,118],"tags":[180,211],"class_list":["post-2172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-single-narrator-audio","tag-cranor-jeffrey","tag-fink-joseph"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2435,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions\/2435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}