As Welcome to Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink tells it in the introduction to Mostly Void, Partially Stars, the published transcripts to the first 25 episodes of Night Vale, the paragraph above about lights above the Arbyâsâwhich appears in the pilot episode (âPilotâ)âwas the first bit written for the program and captured the âmoodâ he was hoping to achieve. âFor a long time after,â continues Fink , âwhen I was trying to make something fit the world of Night Vale, I thought back to that first paragraph I wrote and tried to capture the same feeling I had when I wrote itâ (Fink , âIntroductionâ xviii). In starting to think critically about Night Valeâabout what it is, what it means, how it means, why it has become so popular, why it matters, and so onâperhaps we can let ourselves be directed by Fink , who points out for us a particularly rich and resonant passage present from the start and highlights for us the roles of âmoodâ (âIntroductionâ xviii) and âfeelingâ in his own consideration of the program. So let us begin, like Fink , with two lights against the backdrop of the night sky. The first is the familiar red and white neon sign of the fast food chain (probably the one with the name plastered across the front of the outline of a cowboy hat)âreal-world, working class (maybe even a bit red-necky) everyday American capitalism. And then we mentally pan up to the other light, âsomething higher and beyond that,â the antithesis of the commonplace first. In the space of âabout a hundred feet,â we shift our view from the quotidian to the interstellar, from the familiar world of weather to the mysteries of the universe and the voidâand we find them in close proximity, one literally hovering over the other. The sublimeâextraterrestrial life and the profound expanse of the universeâcomingling with the profane in a kind of cosmic comedy: aliens at the Arbyâs.
In intertwining the familiar with the weird and exotic, Welcome to Night Vale, for all its brilliant strangeness, participates in a well-established narrative tradition. In order, therefore, to consider what Night Vale does that is new, it is useful to cast a backward glance over its generic affinities. First, however, a bit of background on just what Night Vale is may be useful. Typically airing on the 1st and 15th of each month, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcastâan episodic series of digital audio files that can be streamed online or downloaded. Premiering on June 15, 2012, the series purports to be a community radio program broadcast from the fictional town of Night Vale. Located somewhere in the Southwestern US, Night Vale is, as characterized by Fink , âa town where every conspiracy theory is true and people just have to go on with their livesâ (âIntroductionâ xviii). Described variously as ââA Prairie Home Companionâ with LSD in its drinking waterâ (Barton), a place âwhere David Lynch meets âThe Twilight Zoneââ (Baker-Whitelaw), âlike a local news Twin Peaksâ (Virtue), and âLake Wobegon meets H.P. Lovecraftâ (Maksym), Night Vale, as co-creator Jeffrey Cranor explained in a National Public Radio interview, presents âa mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts, or spirits, or conspiracies or underground societiesâ (âWelcome to âNight Valeââ).
From humble beginnings in June of 2012 with 50 total downloads in its first week, the programâs popularity swelled until in August of 2013, two months into its second year, Night Vale surpassed the podcasts Radiolab and This American Life to become the #1 podcast on iTunes, having been downloaded 8.5 million times in August alone (Cranor , âIntroductionâ xiv). Cranor attributes this success to fan enthusiasm on the social networking website Tumblrâand then correlates this enthusiasm with three factors: solid writing, originality, and perhaps most importantly, the programâs representation of the same-sex relationship between Night Vale Public Radio (NVPR) host Cecil Palmer (voiced by Cecil Baldwin) and scientist Carlos (originally voiced by Jeffrey Cranor until episode 17, and then voiced by Dylan Marron). Max Sebela, a creative strategist at Tumblr, reported that fandom began to âspiral out of controlâ on Tumblr starting around July 5, 2013, with over 183,000 individual blogs and 680,000 Night Vale-related notes in a one-week period following episode 27, âFirst Date,â in which Cecil recounts his first date with Carlos (Carlson). âMany fans have told us that this relationship means so much to them,â writes Cranor (xv). As Bottomley observes, âthe podcast has consistently remained in or near iTunesâ Top 20 rankings in the United States ever since [August of 2013], and regularly charts internationally tooâ (179). The success of the podcast , which in December of 2016 celebrated its 100th episode, has subsequently led to several touring live Night Vale shows and two novels so far set in the Night Vale universe: Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel (2015) and It Devours! (2017).
For Bottomley , the success of Night Vale, âan independent production, made on a shoestring budget by a small group of creative personnel with no ties to the traditional radio industry, a podcasting network, or any other major media institutionâ (182), is all the more remarkable for its doing so âin a space increasingly dominated by professional media producersâ (180). While celebrating Night Valeâs uniqueness, however, Bottomley does offer a helpful overview of how the program arrives at its unusual format through the âremediationââthe appropriation and refashioningâof older media forms: notably radio drama and community and talk radio. The podcast , as a scripted narrative written, performed, and produced to be heard, explains Bottomley , is a throwback to the days of radio drama (183), and Night Valeâs generic affinitiesâa mix of comedy, science fiction, and horrorârecalls the most popular forms of programming during the âgolden ageâ of radio during the 1940s and 1950s. Welcome to Night Vale, although a podcast , carries on the tradition of radio programs such as Inner Sanctum Mystery (1941â1952) and The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938) (the latter of which is perhaps most famous for the broadcast of its adaptation of H.G. Wellsâ The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, and the ensuing panic). Bottomley also points out that, while the topics Cecil discusses on Night Vale may be unusual, his presentation of them is actually quite familiar, as its use of the primary codes of radio productionâspeech, music, noise, and silenceâare in keeping with standard radio production (185). And while Cecilâs quirky commentary or confessional moments may not correspond to the kind of news presentation one is used to from American National Public Radio, for example, there is nevertheless âa long and rich history of more marginal forms of talk radioâ (186) from which Night Vale borrows. Radio practices familiar to us today from talk radio and community radio âprovide the context in which [Night Valeâs] narrative operates as entertainmentâ (Bottomley 185).
Night Vale, too, as its creators acknowledge, derives inspiration from a range of literary, televisual, and cinematic sources, both older and contemporary. The horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is one frequent point of reference and seems especially apropos given that Night Vale co-creator Jeffrey Fink served as the editor for a 2010 anthology of fiction titled A Commonplace Book of the Weird: The Untold Stories of H.P. Lovecraftâa collection of weird fiction to which both he and Cranor contributed stories. Lovecraftâs weird fiction of the 1920s and 1930s is built on the premise that the universe is a much stranger place than human beings acknowledge and that human achievement counts for very little when considered in light of...