Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Craner have created a delightful science fiction/fantasy/mystery novel in Welcome to Night Vale. Based on a podcast of the same name, Welcome to Night Vale teams up a 19-year-old pawnbroker and a single mother to find the mother's son and the nature (and location) of King City. That the pawnbroker has been 19 for several decades and the son is a shape shifter are hardly the oddest things about the town of Night Vale, where the used-car salesmen are werewolves and the librarians are, how shall one say, very protective of library materials. While this may seem at first like a quick read, one soon slows down to enjoy the sentences and the sense of dark, daffy whimsy.
Charlaine Harris has written about the supernatural and their environs more than once, her most recent outings being the first two books in the Midnight, Texas Trilogy. Midnight Crossroad introduces us to the inhabitants of Midnight, Texas, including newcomer Manfred Bernardo, a real psychic. Much to Bernardo's surprise, everyone in town is a little supernaturally different and they respect each other's many secrets. That is, of course, until they set out to solve the murder of one of their own.
If your taste runs more to the macabre, Madeline Roux's Allison Hewitt Is Trapped might be up your alley. Ms. Hewitt and her colleagues are stuck inside a bookstore when the zombie apocalypse hits. They soon escape to a community center, Allison blogging all the way on an emergency military network. The blog device (complete with comments at the end of each post/chapter), witty characterizations, and well-done action are what differentiate this book from the crowd of zombies-in-a-small-town horror books.
David Wong's John Dies at the End is based on his web site. John and David are slackers with a taste for chemical recreation in an unnamed Midwestern burg. After one of them ingests a drug called "soy sauce," not only does he temporarily die, but he lets in frightening beings from elsewhere in the space/time continuum. Soon it becomes clear that John and David are all that's keeping Earth from being annihilated, starting with their home town. While somewhat gruesome, this novel of alien invasion has both moments of hilarity worthy of Douglas Adams and chills like those of Clive Barker. The characters are deeper than one might expect in this variety of fiction, making for a novel that rises above most in the genre.
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