Bonus: Excerpt 2 from "The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home"

and I don't just write Welcome to Nightville, we also write books that are not about Nightville, and here are some of them.

Alice Isn't Dead, a lesbian road trip horror love story for fans of Stephen King.

The Halloween Moon, my book for kids of any age about a Halloween where things really start to get weird for everyone.

The First 10 Years, a memoir from me and my wife about our relationship told year by year without consulting each other about our differences in memory.

And from Jeffrey, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, an apocalyptic novel that takes place in the same universe as the Within the Wires podcast.

No matter what you're looking for, we've written a book just for you.

Find them where you find books.

Okay, bye.

If you're dying for the next batch of Wednesday Season 2 to drop on Netflix, then I'll let you in on a secret.

The Wednesday Season 2 official wocast is already here.

Dive deeper into the mysteries of Wednesday with the Ultimate Companion Video Podcast.

Join the frightfully funny Caitlin Riley, along with her producer, Thing, as she sits down with the cast and crew.

Together, they'll unravel each shocking twist, dissect the dynamics lurking beneath, unearth Adam's family lore, and answer all of your lingering questions.

Guests include Emma Myers, Joy Sunday, Hunter Doohan, Steve Buscemi, Fred Armison, Catherine Zeta Jones, the Joanna Lumley, also show creators Al Goh and Miles Miller, and of course Wednesday herself, Jenna Ortega, plus many, many more.

With eight delightfully dark episodes to devour, you'll be drawn into the haunting halls of Nevermore Academy deeper than ever before.

But beware, you know where curiosity often leads.

The Wednesday season two official wocast is available in audio and video on todoom.com or wherever it is you get your podcasts.

It is the big day.

The newest Welcome to Night Vale novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, is out.

It's out in the wild, waiting for you to buy it and read it and be thrilled and scared and blown away by it.

And I know you're going to read it all in one night, but don't be spoiling, okay?

So, as you probably know, me and Joseph's multi-city book tour is canceled because of reasons, but we are doing a giant online book tour from 3 to 7 p.m.

Eastern Time today, March 24th.

Go to the Welcome to Night Vale YouTube page to join me and Joseph Live talking about the book, visiting with super special guests, reading passages from the novel, and even taking your questions.

And if you miss the live experience, you can still watch the entire feed or part of the feed on YouTube.

For more information on the faceless old woman and this feed and anything else, go to welcometonightvale.com slash books.

Listen, I'm really excited for this novel.

I'm really proud of this epic story of terror and vengeance.

Plus, there's a giant in it, and she is cool as heck.

Here is one more excerpt from the audiobook read by Night Vale's own Mara Wilson.

Again, welcome to nightvale.com/slash books for details on cool independent bookstores you can buy it from, or go to wherever you usually get your books.

Okay, enjoy.

An Estate by the Sea

1792-1805.

1.

I was born on the Mediterranean, on the water itself, in a small boat that my father was frantically rowing in order to take my mother to medical care she would never live to need.

What chance did I have when my first act was to take another's life?

My father let the oars fall once I had arrived and my mother had left.

He cradled me with one hand and his wife with the other, and then he made his way back to shore.

I was his first and his last child.

From then on, we would only have each other.

Maybe lesser men would have responded to the trauma of losing a wife by resenting my existence, or by forever associating me with sorrow.

But my father was not a lesser man.

He buried my mother on the edge of our estate, on a hill overlooking the water she had died upon.

When I was very young he would take me to visit the grave regularly, but as I grew older, he realized I had no memory of a mother, and he himself needed no reminder, and so gradually we visited less, and then eventually not at all.

Still, once a year, he would go out by himself to the grave and carefully tend to it, clearing off weeds, making sure the path to it was passable, that the view from her plot to the water was unhindered.

He never married again, nor showed any interest in women.

This wasn't an act of misguided nobility.

He was so fully occupied by raising a daughter, and by his mysterious work that there simply was never space for a second act of his romantic life.

Maybe if this story had turned out differently, he would have eventually, as an older man, found room in his life for love.

But this story can only turn out the way things happened.

I cannot conjure a happy ending where none exists.

I never missed my mother.

I don't mean this to sound strong or uncaring.

I just never knew what a mother was enough to miss one.

And my father was such a warm and loving parent that I did not feel a missing piece in my life.

Any sorrow I felt was on my father's behalf, for I loved him completely, and I knew that her death had been a great blow to him.

So at night, in bed, listening to the whispering of the same warm seawater upon which I had come to be and my mother had come to pass,

I would lay awake and wish that the tragedy could be undone.

But it was never for my own sake.

I only ever wanted my father to be happy.

Here is what an orange tree smells like.

At the base of the tree, it smells of soil, the churn of earth and the sun that heats it.

If it is warm enough to grow oranges, then it is warm enough to bake the soil and the scent will rise up, a dense, gritty smell, pleasant without being beautiful.

When rain comes, the smell changes, becoming sharper, a smell that is as squishy and thick as the mud that makes it.

The tree itself smells like a house that will never be finished building, the dust of wood and all that binds wood together.

It is a smell that grows with the tree, gaining the smells of what lives on and around it.

A squirrel runs up the bark, and now the squirrel's nest, a faint trace of pungent animal, mixes in with the stolid smell of wood.

Between the continuous vegetable hum of the leaves, there are the flowers that smell more like fruit than the fruit itself.

A perfume that smells like a miracle, but also a reminder that life does not end with the humanity.

The smell of the flowers is extra-human, and it does not need us.

It is the smell of running under a hot sun, the smell of falling into cool water.

The flowers are the dream of the fruit, and the dream of sweetness to come.

And then the fruit themselves, echoes of the flower's perfume, but more tangible.

There is a weight to their smell, and when punched open with a thumb, the fizzy aroma of pulp and juice.

That is what an orange tree smells like.

Our estate had many orange trees, and many other fruit trees besides.

It was a large and lush place, on a hidden inlet protected from the damage of storms and the curiosity of passing ships.

The Mediterranean was a dangerous and wild place at the time, full of warships on patrol, and merchant ships passing to and from the ports of the east, and pirate and bandit ships, and other ships with strange flags belonging to mysterious organizations whose membership and purpose were unclear, but whose menace was evident to all.

Our tiny inlet was a blessing, allowing us a modicum of peace despite the apparent richness of our estate.

And our estate was quite rich.

The land had belonged to my mother's family, wealthy beneficiaries who luxuriated in fine arts and foods, the fawning attention that comes from kind donations to the poor, and a carefree life not beholden to any business or industry.

Wealth is either a blight upon the soul, or a balm.

My mother's family saw money as a privilege, allowing them to read poetry and explore intellectual gentility, which is why they approved of her marriage to my father, a working man with an average education.

Few rich families of that time would have allowed their daughter to marry into a family without wealth, for fear that a dowry would be taken and the young bride and her family ignored.

As the son of a merchant, my father spent much of his youth traveling to farms to purchase livestock and produce to then sell at larger markets in the city.

He met my mother one summer while stocking figs in a market not far from the estate.

A quick errand into town to buy food turned into a long afternoon of discussion about the sweetest figs in late June.

You can tell the ripest by the smell, he told her, gently holding the green bulb to her nose as she inhaled the aromas of golden syrup and earth.

The long afternoon turned to weeks of not-so-accidental meetings between the two, and that became a courtship.

The family trusted him so thoroughly, and my mother loved him so fully that no question of the integrity of their marriage ever arose.

They were married on the grounds of this estate, which was then handed over to the new couple by my mother's parents.

My father loved this home.

Why would he not?

He had developed a nose for the finest produce, and here he could savor every rich grape, every spring onion, every plump orange.

Beside the citrus groves, there was the main house, a vast thing inhabited now by only my father and me.

There were servants' wings and towers that we left sealed to gather dust.

Eventually, we reduced our presence to one small wing of the house, sleeping in adjacent bedrooms, using what was once a small kitchenette for the stable workers as our place for both cooking and eating.

My father carried the habits of the small merchant family he'd grown up in and didn't know what to do with luxury on the scale it was being offered.

Still, The lands were maintained by a variety of servants who came regularly.

And the area of our house that we'd lived in was also well kept.

And I did eventually begin to wonder, as the years went on, how my father was able to pay for the upkeep of such a large and lush estate when he did not seem to have any job in particular, having given up his merchant travels after I was born.

This was all so long ago.

To parse through my earliest years is difficult.

I am an old woman.

Perhaps the oldest there has ever been.

A mind was never meant to catalogue this much.

A life was never meant to be this long.

But I do retain some memories of my earliest and greatest period of joy, when I lived in ignorance of what the world could do to a person.

I am three years old.

This is my earliest memory.

I am running through the orange groves.

I'm chasing my father, or he is chasing me.

It is a radiant and clear day.

I decide to hide.

I wiggle my way up into one of the trees.

I wedge myself against the trunk a few feet up into the leaves.

I see my father looking for me.

Where is my daughter?

He says in exaggerated confusion.

Where is her beautiful face?

I must see that face again.

Where could it be?

Soon I allow myself to fall onto the soft dirt where my father scoops me up and both of us are laughing.

Was my face actually beautiful?

My father would say so either way.

Another moment.

I don't know how old I am.

Probably five or so.

We are in our little kitchen in our big house and my father is cooking.

I don't remember what he is cooking.

I only remember the smell which is meaty and green, the smell of vegetables cooking in fat.

He asks me to cut the bread for our dinner and he shows me how, supervising my use of the knife, but allowing me to do it myself.

There are only two of us little one, he says.

Both of us need to be able to take care of the other.

He shows me where I should cut, but it is I who carefully lowers the knife through the hard crust.

The smells of onions and herbs and lamb fill this memory and anchors it forever in my mind.

One more memory of my earliest years is not like the others.

I am six years old.

Again, I am in the orange groves, but this time on my own.

My father is away for the afternoon on business, as happened every week or so, and I am left to play around the estate.

I know every disused shed, every good swimming spot, and each climbable tree in the groves, where I could hide and secretly watch the groundskeepers, or the ships in the harbor, or even the deer.

I'm playing in one of these hidden places and I see a shape moving forward in an odd, stop-and-start way across a line of trees.

I assume it was one of the gardeners and called for them.

No one answers.

I'm scared, but determined to be able to tell my father how brave I had been, and so I run after the figure.

Soon I reach the end of the line of trees and break out into the broad grass leading down to the shore.

And there by the shore is a man lurching in a strange, stiff manner.

He does not turn to look back at me, only shambles to the edge of the rock and then tips forward into the water.

I run down to look.

Where he had fallen, the water is clear and shallow, but there is no sign of the man.

I decide I must have been mistaken and do not tell anyone what I have seen.

If you liked this excerpt, go get the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home wherever you get your books and head to welcometonightville.com slash books for details on our live stream book launch, some great independent bookstores you can buy it from, and for links to exclusive signed editions.

Olivia loves a challenge.

It's why she lifts heavy weights

and likes complicated recipes.

But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.

She bundled bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.

Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Ivy Tower.

You were made to take the easy route.

We were made to easily package your trip.

Expedia, made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

Twisters.

We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unschooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, from Greece to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks.

we've talked about why independence day deserves a second look and we've talked about horror movies some that you've never even heard of like conja and hess so if you love movies like we do come along on our cinematic adventure listen to unspooled wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to hit the follow button

Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale's official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast.

Join me, Meg Bashwinner, and fellow tri-hosts Hal Lublin and Symphony Sanders as we dissect all of the cool, squishy, and slimy bits of every episode of Welcome to Night Vale.

Come for the insightful and hilarious commentary, and stay for all of the weird and wild behind-the-scenes stories.

Good morning, Nightvale, with new episodes every other Thursday.

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