I set your shoes on fire.
I finally got around to reading the latest Night Vale novel and whoo boy. This one, wow, this one stands out from all the previous novels, and even from the source material in the podcast. The book we have here takes a shadowy and occasionally whimsical character and turns her into something very different.
In the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is a ghostly figure who lives in every home in Night Vale and…does things. Unexplained things. Think of any random action and she’s probably done it: rearrange your furniture, move your coffee cup six inches to the right, replace the pages in your favorite book with lettuce and put scorpions in your sock drawer. In her first solo outing her focus is on a man named Craig who’s very unhappy about sharing his home with someone he can’t see (usually) and who wants only the best for his life. Even if the road to “best” means things like getting maimed by the one-eyed starving fox she released into his bedroom.
It’s a dark and scary story. But her origin story, the one she narrates starting with her idyllic childhood on a wealthy estate on the Mediterranean more than two hundred years ago, is in many ways much, much darker.
…this story can only turn out the way things happened. I cannot conjure a happy ending where none exists.
Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor have been telling the story of Night Vale since 2012, so they’ve had eight years of practice in setting a tone that’s haunting and surreal and sometimes beautiful, and it shows in this book. The Faceless Old Woman tells the story of her life in a way that uses all the senses to really bring the reader into her world: what an orange tree on a sunny day smells like, what a bustling seaport in Hamburg sounds like, what real happiness feels like.
And she does have moments of happiness throughout her very long life. Her childhood – with her loving father, her doting uncle, and the beautiful boy next door – was filled with comfort and sunlight. When she became a became a pirate in her teenage years (yes, she fled from her home as a teenager to become a pirate. I freaking love this book) she had a series of adventures with a delightful crew of loyal friends who’s talents blended together seamlessly as a team (the smooth-talking and charming front man, the master of disguise, the giantess, and…the one who was really really violent).
She even finds true love, the kind that the authors brought to life in a way that was surprisingly touching and funny and sweet and real.
But happiness is so fragile, and we already know that all her roads lead to a “life” in a small desert town, old and faceless in every home simultaneously, very much alone. And it all starts on the day that her perfect childhood ended.
At some point in our lives, we eat an apple for the last time. We smell coffee for the last time. We use a toilet for the last time, wash ourselves for the last time, get our last haircut. On a grand scale, very few of us are aware – as we have an experience – if it will be the last time we have that experience.
What happens to her is tragic, but how she deals with it is worse, because she decides that the most important thing in her life is her revenge. Whatever she has to do, no matter how long it takes (and the book kept surprising me with just how long some of her plans take) and no matter who gets hurt in the process, it’s all worth it.
Except it isn’t. And she knows it. This book is a PSA about the collateral damage that comes from revenge. She feels horrible about some of the things she does to people who’s only crime was being the next step in her grand plan. She and her friends do whatever they can to try to prevent or undo some of the damage. But again and again she goes ahead with something unforgivable anyway, because she doesn’t just want to kill the people who hurt her, she wants them destroyed. She needs them to suffer and she needs them to know she’s the one making them suffer, and why. She’s sometimes a tragic figure and sometimes closer to being a plague; her need is bigger than herself, maybe even bigger than the planet, and certainly bigger than one mortal lifetime.
Heaven is not heaven if that which you love most is not there. I had come to love my rage the most.
I’ve seen some reviews complain that most of this isn’t really a Night Vale story, since only the parts in the present day take place Night Vale. I think the Night Vale elements are a lot more pervasive than that. We constantly see elements of the wider world that only exist for Night Valians: the horses of Svitz, the eerie stone arches of Franchia, a traditional Luftnarpian wedding ceremony, complete with the bride standing with her mouth open wider than should be humanly possible and the groom dancing a jig while punching himself in the stomach. Yes, the story of the past is filled with swashbuckling and capers and romance and soul-crushing betrayal, and the story of the present is the desert town that’s juuust slightly off-kilter from reality. (I have to say, I would watch the hell out of the Night Vale version of Cheers.) But it’s all told with the same magical-realism tone, where mundane things can be terrifying, and people accept the nonsensical because of course chess is a full-contact sport, and ship owners who stay in port more than half a day have to give up a piece of wood from the ship and no the captain doesn’t get to choose which piece.
(Speaking of tone, I really need to get the audiobook of this next. It’s read by Mara Wilson, the voice of The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home on the Night Vale podcast, and I get chills just from imagining her cold, clinical delivery when describing horrible, horrible things.)
So really this book is actually two books blended together, and it makes sense that the one half is so different from the other because her journey is so long and puts her through so much (a lot of it by her own choice) that she’s unrecognizable by the time we get back to the present day. I should go back and re-listen to the episodes featuring the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, because I’m not going to be able to see the character in the same light. Especially since the way the character’s past connects with the present is something I can honestly say I wasn’t prepared for.