WCXX

It is a fictional local radio station

Welcome To Night Vale blends the weirdness of David Lynch's Twin Peaks and and the banality of American local radio. It was into this "very established genre" that Fink threw his long-held love of conspiracy theory, and Welcome To Night Vale was born. Dog Parks are to be avoided, Street Cleaning Day is an annual disaster and the ominous Sheriff's Secret Police are normal events in the small desert town of Night Vale. "I've always been obsessed with conspiracy theories", Fink explains, "as a kid I would get books of them out of the library and it's fun to delve into the rich tradition of American conspiracy theory in the show." It's the contrast of content and delivery which makes Welcome To Night Vale so good. Cranor says: "I think the banality of community radio is really great because it's a good way to take news and information that is so terrifying and horrible and make it sit alongside the weather or traffic report."

_{Welcome To Night Vale inspires dedicated fanaticism (Twitter.com/NightValeRadio)}

Its presenter, Cecil Baldwin, is both real and fictional

Welcome To Night Vale's morally dubious, but strangely comforting, radio presenter, Cecil Baldwin, is also called Cecil Baldwin. He's an actor by trade who has contributed to the Welcome To Night Vale live shows selling hundreds of tickets in less than a minute. Although Fink admits that "the real Cecil shares very little in common with the fictional Cecil", he stresses that "Cecil the actor and Cecil the character are very much the same person." Neither Fink nor Cranor can remember when Cecil first introduced himself on the show.

It is very funny

While there's plenty of Welcome To Night Vale which is dark: interns meeting grisly, gory deaths; hooded figures wreaking very silent, stealthy havoc and murderous doppelgangers, there's also a lot that is very funny. Take, for example, Khoshekh, a domesticated Cheshire Cat-style feline that has appeared in the men's bathroom at the Night Vale Community Radio Station floating four feet of the ground and is incapable of travel. The men at the station have taken to making him a litter box and buying him food.

The Twitter account is almost as good as the podcast

@NightValeRadio has 133,000 followers, and with good reason: 140 characters is the perfect amount to emit unnerving, creepy humour over the internet from the fictional town. Examples include, "Today is free sample day at the Night Vale Funeral Home" and "LOST: DOG. Has no visible form. Clear, cloudlike, humid. Brings anguish to all it passes through. Reward if never found again." It works because it's in character, as Cranor explains: "We didn't create a Twitter account just to advertise our podcast, it's an extension of what we like doing. It's fun to write short, pithy jokes or weird poetic 140 character statements on something."

It has a surprising listenership

If you're a teenage girl in America, there's a good chance you've been welcomed to Night Vale. "We have a very large teenage girl fanbase for sure", says Cranor, "Most podcasts are listened to almost exclusively by dudes. It's really nice that at our live shows the women in the audience are the larger group."

LOOK: 20 gore-free horror films