What genre is Night Vale?

A question we get occasionally is "what genre is Night Vale?" 

This is, at its heart, an unanswerable question. Genre is a marketing term. It's a way of telling people "liked this other book? then buy this new book!" Of course that's a simplification. Genre can be many other things. A template for writing. A community. A prison to escape. There is no simple definition for genre, even though we can vaguely wave and say easy untruths like "fantasy has elves and sci-fi has rocket ships". 

When we published the first Night Vale novel, we insisted on listing it as general fiction. For us, it was just a book, not sci-fi or fantasy or weird fiction or whatever else you wanted to call it. Despite this, most book stores shelved it under sci-fi. (I guess because there's something vaguely Area 51 about a strange town in the desert, but it's worth noting that nothing in the first Night Vale novel has anything to do with science. There are doppelgangers and monsters and weird encounters, but these would place it more under fantasy than anything. Again, genre has little to do with what's actually in the book, and more with how publishers and bookstores decide to sell you a book.)

As a kid, I read a lot of Jewish folktales. My parents got me all the collections put together by the great Howard Schwartz, and much of my formative storytelling years were spent with clever rabbis, and tricky demons, and the town of Chelm, an entire city of fools. If modern fantasy novels could be made of the folklore of Northern Europe and of the UK, and more recently of China and Japan and Mexico and many other places, then why couldn't fantasy be made out of the rich folklore of Eastern European Jews? Well, maybe I'll get around to trying to answer that question one of these days. I'd like to.

But in the meantime, we have to answer today's question: What genre is Night Vale? Well, it's a story about a clever Jew named Cecil who must face down strange creatures using only his wits and his storytelling, and he lives in a legendary city of fools. Night Vale, is, of course, a Jewish folktale. 

-Joseph Fink