Welcome to Night Vale is a paranormal horror/comedy podcast published by Commonplace Books and created by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Craner. It is presented in the form of a news radio broadcast for the fictional and mysterious desert town of Night Vale where strange occurrences are everyday life. The narrator of the podcast is Cecil Baldwin, portraying a character of the same name who is a journalist that works for the Night Vale community radio.

Night Vale is a fictional town located somewhere in the Southwestern United States. In this town, supernatural occurrences are common. The town is under the jurisdiction of the “sheriff’s secret police” who keep order in the town, monitor all citizens for “mostly 24 hours”, and have placed a ban on all pens and pencils to “stop promoting free thinking”. The upside-down and strange culture of this little desert town is all accepted by the citizens.

Each episode consists of roughly 20-30 minutes and is broken up into several segments. The show often starts with Cecil recounting current events in the town, such as large glowing clouds forming over the local Arby’s and controlling people’s thoughts. This segment is often followed up by traffic reports where Cecil discusses things like ghost cars appearing on the highway only to disappear, and why it is not advised to match speed with these cars in the eyes of the law. Sometimes in between there will be advertisement sections where Cecil will go off on tangents about completely unrelated and sometimes unpleasant things, only to end with the slogan or some kind of product placement for a real company or product. The last segment before Cecil gives his final thoughts on all that has happened throughout the episode is the “weather”. Every episode’s “weather” segment is a song performed by independent artists who ask to have their music featured on the podcast. These songs will often have absolutely nothing to do with weather.

Although there technically are other characters who exist in Welcome to Night Vale, Cecil is the only speaker. Due to this style, the show often takes an approach similar to the famous 1938 radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, relying solely on the narrator and sound effects to drive the story. When the perspective of another character is needed to be told they will never be present themselves on the broadcast. Often the opinions or words of other characters are relayed through Cecil as he states they were either on the phone with him during the break or not close enough to be heard by the microphone.

These characters include Carlos, a scientist who moved into Night Vale to study all of the strange phenomena occurring in the town, but all Cecil can seem to focus on is his “perfect and beautiful hair”. Another character is John Peters, a farmer who has not raised a successful real crop on his peach farm in years due to the desert climate, but often promotes his fresh home grown imaginary corn to Night Vale residents.

Solely from the information Cecil shares on the recent events in the town and its townspeople, Night Vale really does seem to gain depth and really come alive. The dedication to the role and all the recurring members of the community being mentioned over several different episodes truly establishes the setting a way that makes the show only better the more you listen to it. Cecil’s performance in every episode is truly what makes each episode great.

The show really does serve the purpose of being able to entertain and make you laugh with its absurdness, but sometimes there are small nuggets of wisdom or simply thought provoking messages littered throughout that really do stick with you. The weather segment is also a nice change of pace to sit back and enjoy some music from independent artists that are largely unknown.

I highly recommend this podcast for any fans of dark comedy or those who have interest in fiction of the paranormal variety.