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What genre is Night Vale?
🕑 Added 2023-09-07 16:20:02 +0000 UTCA question we get occasionally is "what genre is Night Vale?"
This is, at its heart, an unanswerable question. Genre is a marketing term. It's a way of telling people "liked this other book? then buy this new book!" Of course that's a simplification. Genre can be many other things. A template for writing. A community. A prison to escape. There is no simple definition for genre, even though we can vaguely wave and say easy untruths like "fantasy has elves and sci-fi has rocket ships".
When we published the first Night Vale novel, we insisted on listing it as general fiction. For us, it was just a book, not sci-fi or fantasy or weird fiction or whatever else you wanted to call it. Despite this, most book stores shelved it under sci-fi. (I guess because there's something vaguely Area 51 about a strange town in the desert, but it's worth noting that nothing in the first Night Vale novel has anything to do with science. There are doppelgangers and monsters and weird encounters, but these would place it more under fantasy than anything. Again, genre has little to do with what's actually in the book, and more with how publishers and bookstores decide to sell you a book.)
As a kid, I read a lot of Jewish folktales. My parents got me all the collections put together by the great Howard Schwartz, and much of my formative storytelling years were spent with clever rabbis, and tricky demons, and the town of Chelm, an entire city of fools. If modern fantasy novels could be made of the folklore of Northern Europe and of the UK, and more recently of China and Japan and Mexico and many other places, then why couldn't fantasy be made out of the rich folklore of Eastern European Jews? Well, maybe I'll get around to trying to answer that question one of these days. I'd like to.
But in the meantime, we have to answer today's question: What genre is Night Vale? Well, it's a story about a clever Jew named Cecil who must face down strange creatures using only his wits and his storytelling, and he lives in a legendary city of fools. Night Vale, is, of course, a Jewish folktale.
-Joseph Fink
Comments
Lucy L.
As a homo sapien living in the desert, I would consider Welcome to Night Vale as magical realism. You never really truly know what's out there.
Aviva
thx for the correction?
Jacob Zieper
My heart!
Aleta Fera
Cecil is Jewish??? Love it! I'm about halfway through the archives so I didn't know but so excited to find out. So Abby and Janice are also Jewish? Did Steve convert or was he already?
Victoria miles
I feel like night Vale is like mystery science theater like 5,000
Victoria miles
I view nightbel more of a mystery theater type of thing
Aviva
Didn't Isaac Bashevis Singer say he wrote in Yiddish because when Moshiach comes all the Yiddish-speaking dead will arise and their first question will be: what new thing is there to read? And that they would want to read about ghosts because they've been dead for so long? Night Vale is also very accepting of and responsive to the needs of the ghost population.
Rachel Kahn-Troster
I love this. (and I'm a rabbi but I'd love this regardless). My favorite Jewish holiday, like Cecil's, is Sukkot! And I've always in particular thought "A story about us" is a kind of Yom Kippur sermon. Also, now I'm always going to see Nightvale as a creepy version of Chelm.
