Welcome To Night Vale—the charmingly odd mix of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales, linked story collections like Winesburg, Ohio, and the sound of NPR as broadcast from The Twilight Zone—went from the small, independently produced podcast of Commonplace Books in Brooklyn to one of the most-downloaded shows on iTunes, rubbing shoulders with WTF, The BS Report, and This American Life. Now the show detailing all the supernatural happenings in the fictional desert town of Night Vale will make the leap from audio-only broadcast to a tangible, corporeal book that will warn citizens not to look at the dog park.
Harper Perennial has announced a deal with Night Vale creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor for a novel based on the podcast, to be released in fall 2015. The structure of the book will be much different than the podcast; for one thing, there can’t be musical breaks for “The Weather,” allowing the show to skip directly from the height of conflict to just after a resolution. But Fink and Cranor’s humor has maintained its quality even as the show has expanded in listeners—and Commonplace was first and foremost an independent publisher, so putting Cecil Baldwin’s public radio reports into print form makes logical sense.