31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 12 (Welcome To Night Vale)

And now... the weather.

Wow, I'm not sure how the hell this evaded my radar. It may have been because I didn't get super into it before. I listened to the first two episodes of this, once upon a summer while on a walk, and found it entertaining. Still, there's a bit of personal negativity there as I mildly associate it with a former friend who cut me loose for whatever reasons they deemed fit. Not as much association with them with this thing as there are others, but my place is not to drag; only to lament. Nevertheless, another friend, one who's still around, suggested I do this today. It's perfect for today because I've been busy and I need to slot tomorrow's entry into my viewing slot tonight, basically as soon as this one goes live. With 20 minute episodes that I could just listen to, this seemed ideal. So! Welcome To Night Vale! It's definitely very neat, and has exactly the sort of horror vibes that I'm into. I'd listen to more of it, but I listened to two for this blog post. The first two, to be precise. Maybe this show gets better, maybe it even gets worse, but I haven't quite the time to dig into 90 more of these in half a month so please work with me here as we talk about the first two episodes of Welcome To Night Vale.

The idea of the show, so far as I can gather, is like listening to local radio. I've done that quite a lot, even though the nearest "local" radio station was in Marystown, Newfoundland and it recently shut down all its local broadcasting, without warning. You have your news, your upcoming community events, and the weather. Except, you don't, because this is the news of a sleepy little desert town called Night Vale and everything is super fucked up and conceptually terrifying. Or just plain silly in places. What sells it is the nonchalance of our radio host, who I'm sure has a name but goes unnamed for the two episodes I heard unless my ears drifted out of tune at a crucial moment. His job is to deliver all the news to the listeners of Night Vale's radio station, and he does his job well despite all the continual weird shit that keeps happening. Some of those, like the newly-opened waterfront in a landlocked desert town that the host suggest you visit during a flash flood to truly appreciate, are charming and funny. Others, like a group of scientists led by a man named Carlos (who our host finds very handsome, damn that handsome devil) who continue to study and find all sorts of scientifically impossible shit in Night Vale, are chilling when you think about them. Like the house that doesn't exist, which appears to be right there in between two identical houses but isn't actually there at all. Or the seismic activity counters that say Night Vale should be wracked by constant earthquakes, but nary a tremor is to be found. Then there's just the absolute weird shit where the host describes the joy of beaten eaten alive by a snake, or when he loses his free will to a sentient glow cloud he's been reporting the advance of on and off for the past 15 minutes, calling all of the listeners "slaves of the cloud". The one I really liked was the library being closed for mysterious renovations during some period on an upcoming day, and how it would make the library "unknowable" and thus nobody would be able to remember a thing about it. That shit's creepy!

Talking up Night Vale, I really do dig it. I love conceptual horror bullshit that makes you think about the implications of the terror and the way in which reality is fundamentally altered to suit that terror's continued existence in a rational world. But then, Night Vale is hardly a rational place. Not when a cat can be found continually hovering in place above the sink in the bathroom of the radio station. Or when the NRA give out stickers that proclaim that guns don't kill people because people are immune to bullets. I'm giving away most of the weird shit because the weird shit is what makes Welcome To Night Vale so interesting. That isn't even all the weird shit in the first two episodes, just the ones that stood out most to me. I've used weird shit a lot this past paragraph, but it bears repeating. Welcome To Night Vale is a podcast about weird shit, and if you dig weird shit you should fire it up. As for me, I've got a beast to confront. Tomorrow may be a day of exorcism, but I have to go into the woods and find the evil first.

Ch ch ch ch. Ah ah ah ah.