thebacklistborrower's Reviews (570)

Always can be counted on to relieve the pains of life that ail you.

Somehow this novel manages to blend the absurdity and dark hilarity of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast with a touching tale of what makes a family and the struggles of teens trying to grow up. With nearly all of your favourite cast making a cameo (The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your House, Old Woman Josie, Erika, Steve Carlsberg, Cecil, and others), it is a nod to those who follow the show, but rather than building off those who already have a rich back story, the book focusses on characters who you might have heard about, but were lacking that backstory, leading to an interesting book that doesn't seem too stale, and that will just enrich the podcast as those characters make appearances.

A strange book that seems best described as "prairie noir", straddling a dark story, deaths, affairs, and pain with beautiful descriptions of the people and the places they inhabited. The story was constantly shifting from place to place, and that made it all the more interesting to follow, with who seemed to be the main character - Parley Burns - limited to the sidelines, the elephant of the room, while everybody else lived their lives around him, trying to ignore him.