I also listened to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, as it is one of my favourite forms of entertainment. While I also adore listening to music while running errands or doing chores, podcasts tend to win. However, I never ventured past the true crime bubble, until I found Welcome to Night Vale about a year ago. As luck would have it, I watched The Kirlian Frequency, and was gutted to see Netflix wasn’t expected to host the next season. In my search for a similar show, I found the podcast, and the rest is history. The delightfully odd humour has captured my heart enough to look into the accompanying novels, so here we are.
Nilanjana is an outsider in Night Vale, or, as the locals would call her, an ‘interloper’. As a scientist, she had plenty of good reasons to move to this little dessert town, despite the isolating atmosphere. Still, she seems happy there. That is, until her peace is disturbed by her boss, Carlos, who asks for help in investigating the house that doesn’t exist. With an unlikely ally in Darryl, devout practitioner of the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, Nilanjana will risk her life, question her beliefs and science in what becomes a race against time to save Night Vale.
Nilanjana is a rational scientist who loves her work, and despite feeling a little lonely, is convinced her life is not missing anything. Her narration is incredibly entertaining to read, and Fink and Cranor do a great job of showing off her analytical disposition from a humorous angle. Darryl is another important character, a loyal and active member of the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God. He’s positive and optimistic, determined to repay his faith for the kindness he was shown asa child in need. Nevertheless, as he helps Nilanjana investigate, his normally unwavering beliefs begin to unravel. I enjoyed this storyline immensely, as weird as the belief system outlined is (and how much it feels like a cult!), as I always like reading about characters who reckon with what they believe in through challenging circumstances. In this sense, Nilanjana and Darryl are two sides of the same coin - her, a skeptic, and him, a believer, both go through extensive character development, with a surprisingly honest look at the woes of adulthood.
As expected from Night Vale inhabitants, the secondary cast is full of quite the characters, some familiar to podcast listeners, and others not as much. Most tend to be there for a joke, so there is not much to say here, except that representation is very clear from the main protagonist, to the side characters.
The pacing of It Devours! is very slow initially, with an ending that feels very rushed, which is a definite flaw, that even the delightfully weird world building cannot save. This leads me to my next point - while keeping the weirdness front and centre, Fink and Cranor ensure everything is grounded or explained enough such that even a reader completely unfamiliar with Night Vale would be able to read it with no confusion. Personally, I feel like being introduced into this universe through the novel would increase the reader’s enjoyment, as for me, the preferred way to get my dose of Night Vale through delightfully quirky radio host Cecil Palmer.
An entertaining enough companion novel to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, It Devours! offers delightfully weird take on fiction, with a dash sobering look at adulthood. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a spooky read in October that won’t leave you sleeping with the lights on, but smiling!
Rating: 6/10
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