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Smooth driving in store for Saturday morning travelers

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Josh Archibald has 2 goals in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins win over Lehigh Valley

<p>I&#8217;m not usually one for listening to podcasts, but a couple of years ago, someone recommended &#8220;Welcome to Night Vale&#8221;, which was created in 2012. The podcast is reminiscent of Garrison Keillor&#8217;s &#8220;Lake Wobegon&#8221; if it was written by Stephen King.</p><p>Night Vale is a fictional desert town somewhere in the southwest of the country. All of the strange incidents in the town from murderous librarians to dinosaurs invading through portals, are reported by Cecil Palmer, the local radio host.</p><p>Each episode stands alone, but there are plot developments and jokes that run along the entire series. There are 80 episodes, and the show is currently the top audio podcast on iTunes. Night Vale is insanely popular. It&#8217;s weird, funny and sinister. I haven&#8217;t listened to that many episodes, but what I have heard, I&#8217;ve always enjoyed and found funny.</p><p>So when it was announced that creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, were going to publish a novel about Night Vale, I was very excited. Reading is my preferred form of entertainment, so I&#8217;d rather read about the strange town than listen to the podcast.</p><p>The novel features two characters from the podcast: Jackie Fiero, who owns the town&#8217;s pawn shop, and Diane Crayton, who is treasurer of the PTA. The plot follows the mysterious appearance of the Man in the Tan Jacket, who leaves pieces of paper with people which they then can&#8217;t get rid of. Each piece of paper says &#8220;King City,&#8221; the name of another nearby town.</p><p>Jackie can&#8217;t get rid of the paper no matter what she does, which wrecks havoc on her life&#8217;s routine. Meanwhile, Diane is dealing with the difficulties of raising a teenaged son, made even harder by the fact that her son is a shape shifter. Along with the mysterious Man in a Tan Jacket, Diane begins to see her son&#8217;s father all over town, although she can&#8217;t seem to pin him down for a conversation. Her son, Josh, suddenly wants to get to know his father, which Diane wishes to prevent.</p><p>At first, the women&#8217;s separate missions do not seem connected, but when they begin running into each other constantly during their investigations, they decide to team up and solve the mysteries of the Man in the Tan Jacket and King City together.</p><p>Their journey takes them through Night Vale, bringing them into the path of the dreaded City Council, the terrifying library and of course, Carlos, the beautiful scientist who is dating Cecil. They also encounter several of the town&#8217;s strange inhabitants, like angels who are all named Erika, the faceless old woman who secretly lives in Diane&#8217;s house and glow clouds.</p><p>The novel is everything a podcast devotee would have hoped for. It&#8217;s gotten mostly positive reviews. However, I didn&#8217;t like it. I found the plot unfocused and thought the entire novel was trying to hard to be weird.</p><p>What works in the podcast: the meandering, rambling narration does not work for a novel. There were also many references to characters and incidents from the podcast, which might confuse unfamiliar readers. While most people might see this as a welcome return to the Night Vale they known from the podcast, the authors seemed to try to stuff too many references into what could have been a tighter paced story.</p><p>Instead, this is a novel filled with tangents and asides about the weird happenings in the town, which slows down the pace. In the final third of the book, when Jackie and Diane really start working together, the plot improves and it&#8217;s easier to keep track of the central mystery without all the distraction.</p><p>My suggestion is skip this novel and dive into the wonderful podcast instead. Or, check out the tour schedule and catch Fink and Cranor&#8217;s weird town live. It&#8217;s well worth the strange journey, unlike the overstuffed, poorly paced novel.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Dorothy Sasso</p><p>On the Books</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><factboxMeta><p>&#8220;Welcome to Night Vale&#8221;</p><p>Author: Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor</p><p>Page Number: 416</p><p>Publisher: Harper Perennial</p><p>Rating:&#9830;&#9830;</p></factboxMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Dorothy Sasso is a former Soap Opera Digest writer and a private school teacher. She is busy reading books and raising her daughter.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

On the Books: “Welcome to Night Vale” misses in novel form but continues success with podcasts