It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel

There’s no place quite like Night Vale, a town where shadowy conspiracies and strange events are the norm. But when sinkholes begin opening beneath random buildings, swallowing businesses and people whole, that’s a step too far for some of the town’s residents. Can a young scientist unravel the mystery here? What does it have to do with a house that can’t exist, or the church of a smiling god, or the sinister city council?

Welcome to Night Vale is one of the spookiest and funniest podcasts out there, and It Devours! is their second venture into expanding the Night Vale universe through novels. And boy, did they hit a home run with this one. It Devours! centers around the battle between religion and science — and how they both get it wrong and right — raising questions of the meaning of faith and how we come to believe what we believe.

As heavy as that sounds, the book remains remarkably light, thanks to its rampant weirdness and the sheer amount of laughter it evokes. A peculiar balance of thoughtfulness, strangeness, humor, and heart, it’s everything you could hope for from the world of Night Vale.