If the way Night Vale’s reality keeps slipping — Jackie stuck at nineteen, that impossible slip of paper, a town everyone forgets — delighted you, you’ll sink right into the biologist’s trek into Area X. In Annihilation, a team crosses a border where maps lie, a "tower" burrows downward, and words literally grow on living walls. Like the chase for King City, the rules feel knowable until they aren’t, and each revelation is both eerie and wondrous.

Loved how Night Vale makes you laugh at horrifying things — murderous librarians, ominous PTA agendas, and municipal notices that might be spells? John Dies at the End hits that same tone. Dave and John stumble into cosmic horror via a street drug called Soy Sauce, fight a meat monster, and bicker through apocalypses with the kind of unfazed sarcasm Cecil would read off the community calendar. It’s gross, goofy, and gleefully uncanny.

If Jackie and Diane’s investigation — chasing the Man in the Tan Jacket, testing the edges of memory and maps — hooked you, The City & the City delivers a detective story with equally bizarre civic laws. Inspector Borlú works a murder across two overlapping cities where citizens must "unsee" each other, and crossing the boundary invokes the terrifying force called Breach. Like Night Vale’s forbidden spaces, the case unravels the dangerous customs that hold a surreal society together.

If Diane trying to hold onto who she was with Troy — while parenting a son who changes his face — resonated with you, Hope Arden’s curse will too: everyone forgets her minutes after she leaves. In The Sudden Appearance of Hope, she becomes a thief navigating a world that refuses to remember her, targeting a sinister self-improvement app. It probes the same questions Night Vale raises about names, memory, and the fragile outlines of self.

If Night Vale’s City Council decrees and Sheriff’s Secret Police memos made you grin, The Rook gives you a whole agency of that energy. Myfanwy Thomas wakes amid bodies with letters from her past self, then steps back into her job at the Checquy, a very British outfit managing slime-mold children and psychic nightmares. Like Night Vale’s pawnshop puzzles and municipal hazards, it marries uncanny threats with paperwork, deadlines, and perfectly dry humor.