There's a man no one remembers, a young woman who holds a piece of paper that she can't put down, a boy whose absent father suddenly reappears and reappears and reappears... It's really just your average Night Vale day. 
 I've somehow managed to have never listened to the podcast. I know, I know, I'm just not really a podcast sorta person right now. But many of my friends listen to Night Vale and post quotes and tweets and such, and I've always found them the perfect combination of funny, insightful, and weird. 
 So when I found a Welcome to Night Vale audiobook at my local library, I figured I'd give it a shot - helpfully in a more familiar format. 
 And I really enjoyed it! Night Vale does a fantastic job of 'hyper-reality'. Details of the story are absurd, but they're also true, they are subjective impressions rendered literal. The character of Josh is the perfect example of this: a teenage boy, his body assumes a different shape every day - some days he has skin, some days he has a carapace - but no matter what form he takes, his mother always knows him. 
 I loved how inclusive and refreshing the book is, too. Josh has a crush on a girl and he has a crush on a boy, the only explicit couple in the book are gay men, and the plot revolves around an absent father who is a perfectly nice guy but just not a good father. The central relationship that emerges from the plot is a friendship between two women. It's just wonderful. 
 I see quite a few negative (and negative-ish) reviews complaining about how the narrator's voice carries over into a print, and I can see that. The narrator's intonations and pauses added a great deal to the story. And that's not particularly surprising - these characters were made for a podcast format.