Did you ever wake from a dream you can’t quite remember, but you know it was awful? And it leaves you distracted and weirded out all day?

Welcome to Night Vale.

There’s a lot of original audio drama available on the intertubes these days, especially in the horror and suspense “space,” but here’s the worst-kept secret in the cyberworld: most of it is not very good. And then … there’s Welcome to Night Vale

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The problem with most audio drama is that it’s a not-terribly-savvy pastiche of eighty-year-old radio drama, or purple-prose renderings of ‘classic’ horror stories. (One exception, We’re Alive, is worth talking about in another post.) So by all rights Welcome to Night Vale shouldn’t work at all: a single voice, with a little music, coming from the isolated desert town of Night Vale, giving community snippets and small-town gossip should be boring and stupid and affected.
No. It’s creepy, in the very best way.
The folks at Commonplace Books, specifically Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, have created something that is quite literally indescribably. Voiced by Cecil Baldwin, in a sly and absolutely convincing performance, some have called it “Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King,” while others have said it’s “NPR meets The Mothman Prophencies.” We here at AmityvilleNow International HQ Penthouse tend to see it more as “Radio Cthulhu,” where the Elder Gods may have crawled through a crack between worlds just outside town a few years back, and the result is an eerie, non-understandable and surreal little place you don’t want to visit but can’t quite leave.
Every two weeks – on the first and the fifteenth, faithfully – Welcome to Night Vale can appear in your podcast harvester, and each one is a little weirder than the last. And they must be doing something right. It’s become the second post popular podcast on the ‘net, right behind This American Life (which has NPR to pimp for it). Now they’re doing tours and live shows, and you can even buy decals and office products from Night Vale on amazon.
Go visit Welcome to Night Vale right here. You won’t regret it…and you won’t want to leave. Oh, and their first live recording just became available here, on bandcamp. You can pay as much as you want, and keep it forever.