Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale Podcasting between Weather and the Void

With well over one-hundred episodes, the podcast Welcome to Night Vale has spawned several international live tours, two novels set in the Night Vale universe, and an extensive volume of fan fiction and commentary. However, despite its immense popularity, Welcome to Night Vale has received almost no academic scrutiny. This edited collection of scholarly essays—the very first of its kind on a podcast—attempts to redress this lack of attention to Night Vale by bringing together an international group of scholars from different disciplines to consider the program’s form, themes, politics, and fanbase. After a thorough introduction by the volume’s editor, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, the eight contributors not only offer close analysis of Night Vale, but use the program as the impetus for broader explorations of new media, gender, the constitution of identity, the construction of place, and the human relationship to meaning and the non-human.

1. Introduction: Between Weather and the Void: Welcome to Night Vale (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock)

2. “Everything about him was just perfect. And I fell in love instantly”: Life and Love in Welcome to Night Vale (Dawn Stobbart)

3. Our Friendly Desert Town: Alternative Podcast Culture in Welcome to Night Vale (Danielle Hancock)

4. On Floating Cats, Good Boys, and Shapeshifting Zookeepers: Animals in Night Vale (Heidi Lyn)

5. “It would make more sense for it to be there than not”: Constructing Night Vale as a “Place” (Andy McCumber)

6. “More Reassuring Noise in this Quiet World”: Narrative Intimacy and the Acousmatic Voice of Night Vale (Grace Gist)

7. Who Killed Cecil Palmer?: The Role of Memory in Night Vale’s Self-Narrative Rupture (Michael Patrick Vaughn)

8. Ode for the Lights above the Arby’s: Reading Welcome to Night Vale through the Lens of Poetry (Elliott Freeman)

9. “Fear the Night Sky!”: On the Nightvalian Void and an Ethics of Risk (Line Henriksen)