Welcome to Night Vale - A message from Joseph Fink

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

Joseph Fink, co-writer of Welcome to Night Vale, here with a special message about his new novel, Alice Isn’t Dead, a retelling and reimagining of the story from the podcast of the same name. The Alice Isn’t Dead novel is on sale now online and at your local independent book store: http://aliceisntdead.com/#novel See Joseph Fink across the country on the Alice Isn’t Dead book tour, coming to a city near you starting tonight in Brooklyn: http://aliceisntdead.com/#book-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, Joseph Fink here, co-writer of this show you listen to. I wanted to let you know I have a new novel out called Alice Isn't Dead. It's a horror thriller road trip about a truck driver searching for her long-lost wife across a very strange America. If you're a fan of American Gods or Stephen King or Nightfail, I think you'll like it. I wanted to share with you here two short things. One is the first chapter of the novel, performed by Nightfail's own Jessica Nicole, and the other is a short letter to the reader I wrote a while back. It's not in the final version of the book, so call this a little bonus thing.

But I think it talks through a little bit of the mentality behind the writing. The novel is the most personal thing I've ever written, and I'm very proud of it. I'll be doing an 18-city book tour all over the country. In fact, by the time you hear this, I'm already doing it. These events are conversations with some of my favorite writers, followed by a reading, followed by an audience Q&A, and then finally a signing. Most of these events are free or free with purchase of the book, so check out the schedule at Alice Isn't Dead.com.

Okay, here's the chapter and then the letter to the reader. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the dead return. Because light reverses. Because the sky is a gap. Because it's a shout. because light reverses, because the dead return, because footsteps in the basement, because footsteps on the roof, because the sky is a shout, because it's a gap, because the grass doesn't grow, or grows too much,

or grows wrong, because the dead return, because the dead return. One. Kisha Taylor settled back into the booth and tried to enjoy her turkey club. The turkey club did not make this easy. A diner attached to a gas station, a couple hours outside of Bismarck. A grassy place between towns. Kisha's main criteria for choosing the diner had been ample parking for her truck. Once upon a time, people chose food based on the season, or the migration. patterns of animals. She selected her meals based on the parking situation. Her difficult relationship with what the menu called the chef's special club was made more complicated by a patron in the booth adjacent to hers. The man was eating an omelet, scooping big chunks of egg with long, grease-stained fingers, and shoving them into his mouth, each bite followed by a low grunt.

He was a large man, with a face that sagged on one side, a lump on the top of his shoulder, and a long fold of extra skin hanging from one arm. His clothes were filthy, and she could smell him from where she sat. He smelled like rot, not bad, exactly, but earthy, like fruit disintegrating into soil. His dirty yellow polo shirt had the word thistle on it. He was staring at Keisha with eyes that went yellow at the edges. He chewed with his mouth open, and his teeth and food were both a dull yellow. Kisha did her best to look anywhere else.

At the crowd of bystanders behind the on-location reporter on the muted televisions, a crowd she reflexively scanned for a familiar. face, or the bathroom door as the cook took his third visit since she had arrived. At a van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name Praxis in bubble font. But the man's grunts were insistent, and soon she couldn't look anywhere else. And then, to her horror, he got up, omelet hanging from his lips, and limped toward her like his legs had no muscle, mere sacks of meat attached loosely to his torso. Doesn't look much like rain, he said, plopping himself across the table from her

and licking the egg off his lips with long, wet passes of his pale tongue. The smell of damp earth got stronger. Her heart was pounding, as it often did when she felt trapped, which she often did. Her life, at the best of times, was a minefield of possible triggers for her anxiety, and this was not the best of times. "'Hope you don't mind if I join you,' he said, not a question or a request, but a joke. He laughed, and his jaw sank crookedly into his neck. "'I was hoping to eat alone,' she said down at her sandwich. Good people deserve good things.

She didn't know what to say to that. He scratched his cheek and some of the skin peeled away. It's dangerous out here. She didn't want to engage with him at all, felt even responding negatively might encourage him. So she started to slide off the duct tape patchwork that had once been a booth, grabbing her backpack and making a determined look toward the door against the pulsing of her panicked heart. He held a hand up, and she froze, wanting to leave but not able to find a way to do so. Want to see something funny? he said, in a voice with no humor in it.

It is often said that bad experiences are like nightmares. But what Keisha noticed most in this moment was, how real it was, how she couldn't escape its reality, how she would never be able to convince herself she had remembered any part of that evening incorrectly. He got up, wiping the egg from his hands onto the word thistle on his chest. His face was slack and not arranged right. He walked over to a table where a man sat, a truck driver probably. The man looked like a truck driver. The man looked like a truck driver, she thought. What does a truck driver look like? Hey, Earl, the thistle man said. Huh? said Earl, frowning. The thistle man grabbed him by the

back of his neck, and Earl's face went blank. The thistle man guided Earl gently out of his seat, like a parent shepherding a sleepy child. Earl's eyes were empty pools of water. Neither Earl nor the thistleman paid their checks. No one made a move to help. No one looked. Keisha didn't know what to do. She walked toward the door, wanting to help, having no idea how. You planning on paying for that, said her waitress.

What? Yeah, I was just, yeah. Keisha handed over what she thought was the right amount, left some sort of tip, and then was outside in a night unusually hot for early Midwestern spring. The lights on one side of the gas station were out, and in the shadows, the man in the thistle shirt was cradling Earl. Earl was fully awake again, but the man's arms clung like ropes around Earl, and he couldn't move. She could see the pulsing of his muscles as he tried, the strain in his face. Behind them, in a different world, people sat eating waffles and sausages.

The man in the thistle shirt said to Earl, who tried to scream in response, but the scream was lost in the baggy flesh of his captor. The loose-skinned man didn't seem human. He was like a boogeyman from a vaguely recalled nightmare. The Thistleman. He bent down and took a bite out of Earl at the artery in his armpit. Earl made a noise like a balloon letting out air, and blood poured down his torso. He was crying, but still couldn't move. The thistle man reached his long fingers into the wound and tore off fragments of flesh, lifting them to his mouth. The movement was the same mechanical movement he had made with the omelet. Kisha had only a moment to decide how to respond and didn't even need that. She ran, of course, ran for her truck with her breath and heartbeat deafening in her ears.

The thistleman chuckled as she went, slurping another fragment of Earl's body into his mouth. As Kisha started the engine, she looked at Earl, who looked back at her. A man who had expected to go to sleep tonight, who had ideas about what the next few days would be like for him, had some sort of plan for the future, who was instead watching the one person who could help him driving herself to safety, leaving him with only a monster to accompany him in his dissipation. Although Earl and his murderer didn't know it, there was another witness. A small figure in a who, he was a who, a little figure in a who, hoodie, standing behind one of the fuel pumps, the hood drawn over the face. The figure in the hoodie wasn't running away, but was no more able to help than Keisha. Some moments can't be changed. Dear Reader, In the summer that my wife and I began dating, I experienced my first bout of crippling anxiety. I could hardly get out of bed. Air stopped working for me.

While people walked down the streets of Manhattan, blithely sucking in oxygen like it would never go away, there I was, somehow drowning. Most women would have justifiably run, but my wife drove out from New Jersey when I was having a particularly bad panic attack, bringing me a pile of comedy DVDs and a box of chocolate-covered strawberries. We took the bakery string from that box and tied pieces of it around each other's wrist. as a reminder of that moment of love before we had even used the word. Almost a decade later, we still have matching bakery string around our wrists. Don't worry, we do fresh ones occasionally. It's not the same ragged string from 2009. These bouts of anxiety would come and go, sometimes completely overwhelming me,

right up until I finally allowed myself to write about the fear. First, I wrote the podcast, Welcome to Nightvale, a show in which I piled all of my doubts and anxieties and thoughts about mortality. Then I wrote, Alice isn't dead, where the main character suffers from anxiety, and not just anxiety, but the exact kind of anxiety I do. Her experience of the disorder might not be yours, but I promise you that it's not. it's very much mine. Since allowing myself to incorporate anxiety in my writing, it has lessened in my life. Not gone away, of course. I am anxious literally every second of every day, but it is manageable.

Air hasn't stopped working for me in years. Writing horror is therapeutic, in the same way that reading horror is therapeutic. It provides a harmless way to consider your darkest, and bleakest thoughts, dragging those anxieties into the light, and, in doing so, at least partially disarming them. Writers of horror are often asked if we are ever scared by one of our own stories, but these images and fears were already inside our brains. That's how we were able to come up with them. Horror writing is just us taking the fears we've always lived with and sharing them with anyone who wants to partake. Keisha, the main character of this book, has anxiety.

This is a fact of her life and her identity. There is a comfort in naming something about yourself, even if it's something you wish wasn't there. It gives you power over it and allows you to incorporate. it into your sense of self. Through the course of this book, Keisha faces genuine danger and terrifying creatures, while also struggling with baseline anxiety. Just because fear is often irrational doesn't mean that the world isn't a scary place. Anxiety can't be fixed, but it can be lived with.

It was important to me that Keisha not be corrected. that her character arc not be the story of her overcoming anxiety and coming out the other end serene and well-adjusted. That's not how brains work. She finishes this story as anxious as when she started, but with the knowledge that she can live with that anxiety, that it is as natural to her as heart and lungs, even if it sometimes makes the former pound and the latter gasp.

Anxiety is her and my oldest enemy, and it is her and my oldest friend, and it is her and it is me. There is no separating our anxiety from who we are. As Keisha says in the face of one of her many dangerous adversaries, I'm not afraid of feeling afraid. Again, get information on buying the book and the 18 city book tour at alice isn't dead.com. Thanks.