Absurdist horror and the horrifically absurd - A case study of Welcome to Night Vale

Recently, I got back into reading more. I’m commuting to work by train and have the time now, which I use to either stare blankly out of the window, nap, or read. Therefore, I finally managed to finish the Welcome to Night Vale novel It Devours! by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. It has given me the idea to write an analysis of a specific technique they use to create suspense and unease. To do that I will use an excerpt not from this novel but the one preceding it, simply called Welcome to Night Vale.

 

Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. In it, the radio show host Cecil Baldwin (voiced by a man of the same name) talks about the going-ons in the fictive small desert community of Night Vale. These goings-on are almost always surreal, absurd, and often border on eldritch horror. They are told, however, in such a way that they are naturally intertwined with the everyday life of the town and mundane and unremarkable to the residents, and therefore, while novel to the listeners, not a source of horror. That horror comes from the characters reactions to these occurences. If something is normal absurd or scary absurd depends solely on how it is treated in-universe.

The excerpt of chapter 9 (p. 75-81) of the Welcome to Night Vale novel discussed in the following is a perfect example to demonstrate this strategy in action.

In the novel perpetual nineteen-year-old pawnshop owner Jackie Fierro receives a mysterious paper she cannot let go of and attempts to investigate the man who gave it to her; a search which slowly unravels her life. Mind you, the fact that Jackie does not grow older isn’t presented as unusual (in the beginning), time works different in Night Vale after all. Neither are her strange business practices considered worrisome - she buys abstract concepts for example and it requires an intricate ritual. The little slip of paper in her hand, however, is. To distract herself, Jackie visits her mother in chapter 9, only to find that the house she lives in seems sterile and Jackie can’t shake the feeling of unfamiliarity.  

“She looked around the kitchen trying to guess which drawer held the silverware, the surest sign of kitchen familiarity, and she hadn’t a clue.

[…]

Jackie tried another drawer. It was full of an opaque, fatty liquid, simmering from some invisible heat source.” (p. 77-78)

Now, searching for the silverware drawer in your mother’s kitchen and instead finding a drawer full of a mysterious pulsating liquid would in any other story be cause for alarm. It’s a grotesque image, the strangeness of which can in already tense situations elicit horror. That is, however, not the case here, as the following lines prove.

““No,” Jackie told herself. She hadn’t been looking for the hot milk drawer. The silverware drawer. If she knew where that was, then she knew the house. If she didn’t, then.” (p. 78)

The strange liquid isn’t the problem. Jackie casually refers to it as hot milk in a way that suggests that having such a drawer is not only not unusual but expected, something everyone has in their kitchen in Night Vale. The novelty is only for the reader and therefore accepted as a part of the quirky fictional world. While the discovery of the boiling liquid in the drawer does add to the horror, it’s not because the liquid is an alarming find, but because it is NOT the silverware Jackie is searching for and therefore proof that she does not know the kitchen or the house.

The first drawer Jackie tries is full of towels. Regular kitchen towels the readers might store in their kitchens as well. The tension and unease in that case is the same as with the hot milk drawer later.

There’s this technique called defamiliarization, a term coined by Viktor Shklovsky, which refers to making unfamiliar everyday objects and concepts. It can be used in art, poetry, and literature to focus the reader’s/audience’s perception on the artistic language, to elicit unease and subtle horror, or for comical purposes. Nathan W Pyle’s comics about blue aliens are an example of the latter. The aliens call, for example, a ‘hug’ a ‘mutual limb enclosure’, a ‘candle’ a ‘primitive light source’ and a ‘tan’ ‘star damage’.

What WTNV does, is almost the opposite. They take concepts that are unfamiliar and frightening and normalize them in description. Through their POV-character’s narrative perspective objects and occurrences that at first seem strange, and possibly unsettling, are turned mundane, which makes it immediately obvious when something strange is in fact grounds for terror.

Jackie not knowing where the silverware drawer is could very easily be mundane in-universe. It would, for example, not be out of the realm of possibility that drawers in Night Vale’s kitchens just switch from time to time or maybe the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home changes them to keep you on your toes. Because neither Jackie nor her mother offer up a casual explanation for Jackie’s lack of familiarity with the drawers, it becomes unsettling. In fact, not only does no one offer up an explanation, Jackie’s mother insists that she should be familiar with the house and ignores Jackie’s protests that are getting increasingly more agitated (p. 78-79).

In conclusion, WTNV, the podcast as well as the novels, despite being set in a fully surrealist world in which eldritch horrors are abundant, manages to easily distinguish estrangement that is part of the worldbuilding and estrangement that is the source of horror by using the narrative perspective and tone shifts.

Satori over and out