On Monday, the book club tackles Night Film

When it was time to sell the Welcome to Night Vale novel, our agent took us around to talk to a lot of publishers. It was important to her that we not just get the biggest deal possible, but that we work with a publishing house we liked, and with editors we trusted.

One of the things that happened at almost all of these meetings is they would have books they had published out on the table that they thought were similar to Night Vale. Sometimes these books had nothing to do with us (Bruce Springsteen's memoir. The book version of that Stuff White People Like blog) and that was helpful because it let us know that they had not bothered to look into who we were at all. Sometimes the choice of books demonstrated thought and care, but then they would make a show of taking the books back and not letting us keep them, and while that's a minor point it almost always correlated to an editorial team that just kind of sucked to interact with.

And then there were the times that the books on the table were interesting AND the editors were like "take any of those with you if you'd like" and in those cases we knew we had a real contender on our hands.

Which is how I ended up with the book "Night Film", given to us by a lovely editor who we ended up not going with. That night, I opened it up and started to read, and was instantly sucked in.

This book has a love it or hate it reputation. Its main character is (intentionally) a real shithead. The mystery is not solved in any definitive way. Definitive answers are not something this book is interested in.

But I love it. It's a journey through a "night film" version of NYC, one that takes you strange corners and introduces you to strange citizens. In many ways, for me, this became the structural model for the first Night Vale novel. We'll talk about that in more depth in the book club itself.

See you there!

-Joseph

Here's the schedule

Monday April 7: up to chapter 20

Monday April 14: off because Joseph is on vacation

Monday April 21: up to chapter 80 (note this is two weeks worth of reading to account for the week off)

Monday April 28: up to Chapter 94

Monday May 5: up to end of book