People are no strangers to cosmic horror. We love to stare into the eyes of the unknown and grapple with the scale of it all. The truth is that cosmic horror fills a very specific niche in the human psyche: the desire to feel like a tiny insect crawling across a universal page, or a tiny grain of sand in the sea. And yet, in many ways, the genre lets us face our own fears. After all, next week’s physics exam just doesn’t seem scary in comparison to the immense, incomprehensible, and unknown.
That fear of the unknown, whether we like it or not, is omnipresent. It may not always seem like it, but so many fears feed off of the dark and the absence of knowledge. It’s scary to stare into the blind dark, and scarier to think of what the inscrutable future may hold. It’s the same kind of fear that stories like Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, acclaimed podcast “The Magnus Archives,” and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” thrive on. So how can someone come to terms with that fear? Is such a thing even possible?
In the absurdist fiction podcast, “Welcome to Night Vale” by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, the unknown is everywhere. The story, organized in the format of a radio show for the fictional town of Night Vale, is chock full of mysterious aerial lights, Orwellian shadow governments, and an otherworldly cat that floats at a fixed point next to the sink in the men’s bathroom. For the citizens of Night Vale, these phenomena, seeming so odd to the audience, are just a part of their life, the same way difficult tests and uncertain futures are for us. In their acceptance of the unknown, the people of Night Vale show us all the way through life, and, in doing so, provide a home among them.
Night Vale is, in its deepest essence, strange. It is just a strange town. The very first inkling of the podcast, as described by creator Joseph Fink on an NPR interview, is “a town in the desert where all conspiracy theories [are] real.” And it is just that. There is a dog park in town, but “…dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park.” The radio show host, a character called Cecil Palmer, is (appropriately confusingly) voiced by a person named Cecil Baldwin. Cecil (the character) is someone who has lived in Night Vale his entire life, and he seems largely unconcerned with the dog park altogether. Yet the audience, listening to his spiel, feels much the opposite. The listener can’t help but wonder about the dog park, wishing for the characters to approach it to find out what it contains. But none of the characters show the slightest interest in this odd announcement at all. This is just ordinary.
To further the absurdity, the radio station itself is not free from the madness. The station management’s “…office does not physically make sense given the size of the building, but it’s hard to say, really, as no one has ever seen the actual office, only its translucence.” Of course, Cecil refuses to elaborate further on the matter, only saying that he is negotiating his contract with the entity that resides in that office. Afterwards, when Station Management exits the office for the first time in decades to hunt Cecil around the station, he brushes it off and gets right back to work as though nothing is happening. The lack of interest with which Cecil treats the events around him is directly reflective of the town’s attitude: The unusual is just another part of life.
There is also The House that Does Not Exist. “It seems like it exists,” says Cecil. “Like it’s just right there when you look at it, and it’s between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. But it does not exist.” He explains all this in a rather bored and indifferent tone, as though this is just another day on the job. Yet this time, it is different. This time, the oddity does not go ignored. True, most of the town turns a blind eye to the house that does not exist. Everyone does… except for Carlos.
Carlos is new in town, Cecil tells Night Vale. Carlos is a scientist, and he has “beakers,” and “humming electrical instruments,” as well as “perfect hair” and “teeth like a military cemetery.” In other words, Carlos establishes himself as Cecil’s love interest pretty early on. More than that, though, Cecil explains, in the very first episode, that Carlos has only just arrived, that he is confused, and claims to be investigating “the most scientifically interesting community in the US.”
In a sense, the listener is Carlos. He mirrors listeners’ confusion and intense curiosity, so, naturally, he is the one to investigate the nonexistent house. The experience leads to a whole host of shenanigans involving a desert otherworld and an evil radio show host and a major corporation that tries to take over Night Vale (because it turns out the real villain was overconsumption and monetization all along), but that’s beside the point. The thing is that Carlos does investigate the house. Then, he returns home, not with answers, but with experience. Carlos sought out the unknown, tried to understand everything, but instead, he returned with the knowledge that he can not know everything. This is the message that rubs off on the listener as well. It’s okay, the podcast seems to say, if you don’t have everything under control, if you don’t know where you’re going. Carlos did not know, but in the end, he was fine.
Carlos’s love story with Cecil, too, is a direct reflection of his comfort with the unknown. At first, he is distant from Cecil as he runs around, conducting experiments, but then, slowly, he stops. He calls Cecil to ask him to meet. Cecil, who has been in love this whole time, of course agrees, and asks what mystery they’ll be solving next. And this is Carlos’ turning moment, because he replies, “Nothing…I just wanted to see you.” Carlos has slowed down, his acceptance of Cecil in hand with his acceptance of unawareness. His curiosity certainly hasn’t stopped; on the contrary, he keeps exploring, throwing himself into new projects. But his fervor for knowledge is gone, replaced by the understanding that some things can’t be known ahead of time. It’s exciting, having something as immense as the future utterly unknown to you. Carlos takes Cecil’s hand in that scene, and they wait together to find out what the future will bring.
Not everyone learns this lesson, though. Night Vale, that fundamentally strange town, is not the only town in the world—far from it. Sometimes, people from outside, people just like Carlos, want to explain the town utterly. It really can not be argued that the plot revolving around The University of What It Is is Welcome to Night Vale’s most subtle metaphor, but it sure is a poignant one, regardless. During this story arc, we learn a little more about Carlos’s past before Night Vale. Before the events of the first episode, Carlos was a professor at The University of What It Is, before he collected funding to study Night Vale and mysteriously vanished one day. The listeners know, of course, that he did not in fact vanish; he just came to Night Vale to follow through with his study, but seeing the University did not hear from him for the following ten years, they finally thought it prudent to send someone after him.
The person chosen to do this is Dr. Janet Lubelle, Carlos’s old colleague and rival. When she arrives in Night Vale, it becomes clear that the two have very different ideas of what makes proper science. Carlos is the type to “marvel at the beauty and splendor of something so simple as rainfall in sunlight,” but Dr. Lubelle believes that “…that’s a lack of objectivity, and [that Carlos] shouldn’t be allowed to be a scientist….” In fact, in her conviction and drive, Dr. Lubelle very nearly destroys Night Vale in one fell swoop. Upon arrival, she decides to explain everything in Night Vale. She explains away the City Council, previously an amalgamated hive mind of powerful entities, as nothing more than a den of snakes. She explains the Glow Cloud, a mind-controlling cloud that drops dead animals instead of rain, and an honored member of the Night Vale school PTA, as just sunlight, seeping through a regular, non-sentient cloud. Subsequently, the Glow Cloud, the only character as consistent in the story as Cecil himself, dissipates entirely, never to be seen again.
In essence, Dr. Lubelle takes Carlos’ beloved science and uses it to control and destroy his home. On a surface level, this seems to paint science itself in a poor light, encouraging the skewed ideals of the townsfolk as they shun Carlos for the mere practice of the scientific method. Here, Carlos makes a distinction that changes everything. He looks over Dr. Lubelle’s destruction and says, “[it] is the science of those who want the universe to be dreary, to be reduced to a prize that can be held in the hand.” His science, on the other hand, is born out of creation, not destruction. Carlos is willing to leave things in mystery. Dr. Lubelle is not. Carlos is willing to maintain the magic of the unknown, the highs and lows of life, of unpredictability. Dr. Lubelle would control the whole world if she could. There is a reason Dr. Lubelle does not win, abruptly stopped by the child of the Glow Cloud dropping a dead cow on her, mid-speech. It was her inability to accept the enigma that caused her end.
The fear of the unknown is always there. The future is always looming in front of us, uncertain and wavering with every step. Through “Welcome to Night Vale,” we are taught how to trust in uncertainty and accept the ineffable. And there’s something comforting in that. Life would hardly be half as fulfilling if it were all written in stone. It is the very ability to change the future that should, ideally, make it more appealing than oppressive. After all, “We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights—mostly void, partially stars—that sky reminds us we don’t understand even more.”
