The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home
By Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
Harper Perennial, 2020


The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home is the third Night Vale novel, although this is not a series and it does not matter what order these books are read in. This story is a significant departure from the other Night Vale books and podcast, and is actually more an unrelated fantasy novel than it is a Night Vale book.

The Faceless Old Woman is in fact a deceased adventuress whose tales of daring-do take up most of the book. However, she currently resides in Night Vale, and has taken a hapless young man under her wing. As he does live in Night Vale, finding skinned squirrels in his glove-box and seeing shadowy figures behind him in the mirror are not exceptionally weird; but in his case the Night Vale oddities he experiences are all cryptic messages from a supernatural ghoul that just wants him to meet a nice girl, settle down, and raise a family. She's already chosen the wallpaper for the nursery, and is eager for him to get on with his part of the process.

The story flips back and forth between modern-day Night Vale and early 1800s Europe (with special reference to Luftnarp). Night Vale is pretty much the same as it always was, but Europe is very different. The Europe flashbacks, which take up the majority of the novel, read like a Princess Bride knock-off; a pleasant adventure fantasy with near-superhuman characters and big, terrible villains; there is no attempt to connect with real history, but it also avoids most fantastical elements traditional to fairy tales.

Faceless starts her adventure living with her father on a Mediterranean orange farm, an idyllic childhood of note only for its peacefulness. But pirates and smugglers are taking over the local lands, and soon she's drawn into adventures and revenge and thievery; she collects a handsome charmer, a giant strong-woman with superhuman strength, and a master of disguise, and with this select band she makes a living as a master thief, a pirate queen, and an avenging angel, terrorizing all of Europe for decades. And then she ends up haunting a house in Night Vale. Those are the breaks.

Overall, I didn't find this book to be either especially engaging or particularly Night Vale-ish. The modern-day Faceless Old Woman is a good character, and her backstory is a nice, rather epic fantasy tale of pirates and revenge. It's fine, but it's also not what I was expecting and I didn't really find it enjoyable. These things might be related, and if I had had a better idea of what it was before I picked it up I might have read it at a different time, in a different mood, and have enjoyed it more. That said, if you are looking for a story in the general tone of The Princess Bride or Stardust, but with a surreal ghoulish narrator, this may be the book for you.

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