It was a dark and stormy night.

Dreary gray clouds dragged themselves across a dreary gray sky. It was cold. It was raining.

Inside there was a shuffle of feet. The scrape of a door. A slight sense of…apprehension? And a sound. A peculiar sound. A murmur of hundreds of voices. A whisper of a thousand turning pages. A low hum. What was that peculiar, whispering, humming sound?

Oh. It was the sound of 500 podcast-obsessed book nerds vibrating in their seats waiting for the Welcome to Night Vale book tour to start.

On October 24th, the city of Ann Arbor opened wide its many sets of alien arms to welcome Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, creators of the popularly creepy and creepily popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast to town. The show is about a fictitious desert town where werewolves, ghosts, and mysterious lights in the night sky are familiar and routine, the weather is music, and the sleepy town’s supernatural goings-on are all calmly broadcast over the radio for everyone to hear.

Hosted by Literati Bookstore, Fink and Cranor came to Ann Arbor for an hour of questions, answers, and a brief reading as part of a nation-wide tour for their newly released novel Welcome to Night Vale.

Included in the price of the ticket were the following essential items:

-One seat (mostly for sitting, but possible for use as a shield against wild beasts, unknown hooded figures, or existential crises)
-One copy of the new book to take home and read to yourself, to your family, or loudly to strangers at the bus stop
-Human contact (optional)

In the auditorium of Emerson School, the authors took their seats on stage and faced the terrifying horde: hundreds of Night Vale fans wearing their most intricate costumes, their most supportive Night Vale T-shirts, screaming their sincerest screams of excitement.

For a fandom that prizes the mysterious, eerie, and monstrous so highly, it was probably the friendliest event I’ve ever been to.

Singer, rapper, and host Dessa Darling provided most of the questions and all of the enthusiasm allowed by law. She opened the event with a simple question for creator Joseph Fink: “If I were to corner your grandmother in an elevator, what would she have to say about Night Vale’s success?”

From there, it was pretty much a delightfully wacky journey from hilarious anecdotes about Welcome to Night Vale's narrator doing podcasts in his underwear to some Super Heavy Serious Metaphysical Stuff.

This was what impressed me most about the event. The questions, the authors' answers, and the brief reading of the book itself all proved the depth of feeling and philosophical thought that the Night Vale universe both creates for and evokes in its listeners.

I don’t know if you knew this, guys, but despite being pretty funny, Welcome to Night Vale is some deep shit.

Sure, the Q & A included questions as simple as “Do you think this book is going to be banned?” (to which Fink replied, “I hope so!”). But there were also questions as complex as asking the authors what it means to have a body, a physical form as a catalyst for all of your interactions with the world, and if our bodies ultimately determine our destinies.

Yeah. See? Deep.

As an occasional Night Vale podcast listener at an event that seemed to consist entirely of fans who had already heard all 80-or-so episodes and devoured half the book in the fifteen minutes between the hardback hitting their palms and the two creators appearing onstage, I realized one thing pretty quickly: the Night Vale fandom is one that makes you want to be pulled down into its gaping maw. The fans at this event cheered at everything. They clapped at everything. They laughed at everything. They told the guy who took to the microphone before the event had even started—the dude who was only up there to tell them the boring rules of safety and not to trample each other on the way out—that they loved him.

They screamed this. Repeatedly. And they meant it.

Between the positively-charged atmosphere of the event, the clearly devoted and downright pleasant fans, and the creators who have put way more thought into their writing than you might imagine, it was enough to make you wonder: Can I please take a bus to this Night Vale place, or do I need to be dropped from a mother ship into their town square?

Based on the brief 3-page reading done by Jeffrey Cranor and the 20 pages I got through while waiting for the show to start, readers of Welcome to Night Vale can expect the usual dark humor, a cast of strange and mysterious characters, an equally mysterious double-mystery, shape-shifters, sentient houses, and a lot of made-up quotes from famous people.

But, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “This is the end of the article.”

Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library. She prefers her meat rare and has never been seen at work on a full moon.