Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
401 pgs  (Night Vale series #1)

Welcome to Night Vale is the first book by coauthors Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, the creators of the twice-monthly podcast of the same name. Night Vale is a small desert town located somewhere in the American Southwest. But Night Vale is not like any small town you’ve ever driven through, stopped for gas at, or eaten a meal in its local diner. In Night Vale, aliens are real, time is kind of funny, and every conspiracy theory you can imagine is true.

The lives of two of its residents: Jackie Fierro, the pawnshop owner who has been 19 years old for decades, and Diane Crayton, whose son is a moody teenage shapeshifter, are drawn together by bizarre circumstances. Jackie is given a small strip of paper by a man who is impossible to remember if you’re not looking at him. The words KING CITY are written on the paper and Jackie finds she’s physically unable to get rid of it. Meanwhile, Diane’s son Josh has recently become interested in his estranged father, a man who until recently Diane hadn’t seen since she was pregnant with Josh, but who now seems to be everywhere she turn…and he doesn’t appear to have aged a day.

When Josh disappears, Diane believes he’s gone to KING CITY and she enlists Jackie’s help in getting there. But together they discover that physically leaving Night Vale is seemingly impossible.

Welcome to Night Vale is a wildly inventive story. At times it gets a little too absurd for its own good, but overall, it’s funny and entertaining. If you haven’t listened to any of the podcasts set there, it’ll take a while to settle in, but if you’re willing to just buckle up and enjoy the ride, it’s a worthwhile read.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson
463 pgs

I read very little non-fiction. Maybe two or three books out of every one hundred I read is non-fiction. I think the reason I favor fiction so much more is that I read primarily to be entertained, not to learn. It’s a little sad, now that I think about it, but I don’t anticipate changing anytime soon. So, the non-fiction I do read also tends to be entertaining. Erik Larson’s books are perfect examples.

Larson has a great talent for taking an event or a time in history and dissecting it into fascinating bits of information, and then reassembling them into a narrative that is both compelling and informative. A great example is The Devil in the White City in which he details the series of grisly murders which took place in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition. He does a very similar thing with Thunderstruck, in which he recounts two events from history: the scientific discovery and utilization of wireless telegraphy (radio waves), which took place at the turn of the 20^th century and the infamous murder known as the “Crippen case,” and shows how inseparably connected those two events were to each other.

In the late 1890s Guglielmo Marconi developed the world’s first device that could transmit signals wirelessly. At first his device was only able to transmit communications from one side of a room to the other, but eventually he was able to develop the technology enough to transmit messages across the Atlantic Ocean, and ultimately around the world. It was a technology that revolutionized the world.

At the same time Marconi was developing radio technology, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a quiet unassuming man who was married to a loud, overbearing, socialite of a wife, was systematically plotting her death. It was a murder which years later would be the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” and one that Crippen undoubtedly would have gotten away with, if it hadn’t been for Marconi.

I have yet to read a book by Larson that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone without reservation. In a time when we take for granted the ability to communicate with anyone and obtain information from anywhere in the world without effort, it was fascinating to learn the origins of the technology. The fact that its history was tied to one of the most notorious cases of mariticide in British history was an added bonus.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer
434 pgs

It’d been several years since I read a book by Brad Meltzer. I’m not 100% positive why I stopped reading them, but if my memory serves me, I had had enough of his eye-roll-inducing dialogue and decided to give up on him. So, I’m not sure what possessed me to picked up The Escape Artist to see what it was about. When I read the summary, and learned that Meltzer focused his “decoded” lens on Harry Houdini, I thought I’d give him another try.

The action begins right out of the gate, with a small plane going down somewhere over the Alaskan wilderness. One of its passengers, a young woman, has just enough time to write a small note and swallow it before dying in the crash.

The story then moves to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, where Army mortician Jim Zigarowski (Zig) prepares the bodies of U.S. military personnel for burial. He’s the best there is, the one called on for the most difficult jobs of reconstructing facial features and giving the family the opportunity to see their loved ones one last time. When he sees the names of the bodies that just arrived from Alaska, one of them hits too close to home: Nola Brown. Nola was a friend of his own daughter, who died tragically years ago. Zig has never gotten over her death and feels that by doing what he can to repair Nola’s body he will be honoring the memory of his daughter.

When Zig finds the brief note in the woman’s stomach, he discovers that the woman isn’t Nola Brown. He also realizes that the real Nola is still alive, and in terrible danger. It’s up to Zig to discover who wanted Nola dead, and why. Along the way he uncovers a top-secret organization, one whose origins tie back to Harry Houdini, and the suspected role he played as a spy for the U.S. and British governments before World War I.

Overall, I enjoyed The Escape Artist. The characters are solid and the story is entertaining. I even thought the dialogue was a marked improvement from the last of Meltzer’s books I read. Maybe I’ll have to put Meltzer back on my radar.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Britt-Marie Was Here

by Fredrik Backman
324 pgs

Britt-Marie, who was introduced as a side character in Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, is a 63-year-old woman who arrives in the small town of Borg, having recently left her husband after discovering his infidelity. She’s socially awkward, an obsessive tidier and cleaner, and the type of person who believes people should behave a certain way, and doesn’t have much patience for them when they don’t. During her 40-year marriage, Britt-Marie rarely left her flat, and as a result, is, as her husband describes her “socially incompetent.”

Upon arriving in Borg, Britt-Marie gets a job as the caretaker for the rundown Recreational Center, where she meets a group of youth who love to play football (soccer), but who lack both skill and talent for the game. They also lack a coach for their ragtag team and somehow manage to convince Britt-Marie to fill the vacancy.

As the story progresses it’s hard to tell whose life is affected more by the relationships that form between Britt-Marie and the kids. Britt-Marie applies her fastidious nature to caring for the kids, and the kids, in turn, broaden Britt-Marie’s understanding and love for the world she’s been sheltered from for so long. They both grow thanks to the other, and by the end, it’s clear why Backman gave the book the title he did.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆