Introducing the Night Vale book club

Hi all, as you may have heard on the show or in our newsletter, we're starting a book club for Weird Scouts and above. This book club will be personally led by Jeffrey and I, and will be held in the Patreon chat part of our page.

The book we are starting with is Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth, which was one of the two foundational texts of Night Vale (Jeffrey will be leading discussion on the other one next.)

When I was 22, I moved to NYC from California. I did not know anyone in NY, had no jobs lined up, had only been there once briefly to look for a room to rent. It was a roll of the dice by someone who wasn't happy with their life. Maybe this new place will go better for me, I hoped.

(Within four months of moving there, I met my future wife and most of my future collaborators on Night Vale, so this worked out very well for me)

During that time, I didn't have a great deal of money. So one way I would shop for books was to wait for sales on McSweeney's, a publisher I was very into at the time. Then I would bulk buy all the cheap books and that would be my reading for a while. In one of these sales, the book Vacation was $5. It had a cool cover, was cheap, I was in.

I read the book. And then I started it over and read it again. Because it had broken my brain. I hadn't known you could write like that. In both meanings of the word "could": I hadn't known it was possible to write like that and I hadn't known that people were allowed to write like that.

Everything in my writing that came after started with that moment, I think, when Vacation revealed to me that there was so much more to writing than I had been aware of.

Now, I haven't read Vacation in fifteen years. I cannot promise it will be as good as I remember. But I think it's worth visiting, as it was one of the books really bouncing around in my head when I started writing Night Vale.

So get a copy here or here or at a local bookstore or at the library.

Discussion schedule will be:

Jan 6: chapters 1-4

Jan 13: chapters 5-10

Jan 20: chapters 11-14

Jan 27: chapters 15-21

See you there!

-Joseph Fink