Alice Isn’t Dead review: Gorgeously eerie work from the creators of Night Vale

There’s a certain mystique to American motorways. Endless expanses of asphalt with nothing but the radio and the stars for company; a anonymous landscape of diners, truck stops, and ramshackle motels; flat plains that rise into mountainous ranges or dip into valleys lush with forests; a freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want. It’s no wonder that so much fiction pivots on the axis of the road trip.

These places can also be terrifying. It’s easy to get lost here, easy to vanish into that topography of intersections and one-pub towns, easy to meet the wrong person and be reduced to a missing person’s report. And this is where the new serial fiction podcast Alice Isn’t Dead finds us—not in the potential of travel but within its worst outcome.

The premise of the show is simple: a truck driver is travelling the United States looking for the wife she’d assumed was dead. Because it shares a creator with the darkly comedic Welcome To Night Vale (which we absolutely love), you’d be forgiven if you expected something relatively humorous. I certainly did. But where the former is a mix of the macabre and the morbidly funny, the latter … isn’t.

“Omelet”

As though conscious of its spiritual predecessor’s reputation, Alice Isn’t Dead opens on a sly note with a ridiculous title—Omelet, of all things. This introduction ends with the unnamed narrator saying that they’ll start with the aforementioned egg dish.

From here, it gets dark.

I saw a man eating an omelet. But it wasn’t the omelet, but it was just the way he was eating the omelet. He was devouring it. Big chunks of yellow scooped up with long, grease-stained fingers, just shoving them into his mouth.

And he was staring at me.

It’s a vivid, uncomfortable image, one that continues to build even as the sentences shorten, becoming staccato whispers full of urgency. There’s a barely contained terror that Jasika Nicole, who plays Mayor Dana Cardinal in Welcome to Night Vale, delivers with pitch-perfect intonation. Just as she begins plaintively calling to her wife, the recording cuts, and we’re thrust into the middle of a disgruntled observation about cargo and travel-sized deodorant. The monologue is then interrupted again. Click. We hear the roar of cars on the freeway. Click. And all at once—

Big chunks of eggs. Chewing them. Devouring them. He saw me staring back. Now we were staring at each other. Something electric and monstrous there in the diner between us. The face of death in Styrofoam ceiling tiles and sagging pleather booths.

He got up and approached my table. His clothes were filthy. He walked like his legs weren’t muscle and bone but just—sacks of meat attached to his torso.

“Omelet” continues on like this, leaping between vignettes, each transition inevitably preceded on a cliffhanger. The segments vary in size. Some only stretch for the length of a sentence, while others spiral for paragraphs. There doesn’t appear to be any real chronological order to the recordings outside of the monologue about the Thistle-man (the narrator’s name for the omelet eater), or at least any obvious clues pointing to as such, leaving listeners to string together the chain of events on their own.

I found the epistolary approach slightly disorienting, given that I usually listen to podcasts while doing something entirely unrelated. But that may be the reason propelling this choice in storytelling formats. Alice Isn’t Dead needs you to be paying attention. You can’t have a good mystery if the audience is only tangentially aware of the pieces; you can’t build meaningful horror if the listener isn’t conscious of the build-up.

The events in “Omelet” soon crescendo into a terrifying stand-off that ends with the narrator fleeing to her truck, now haunted by visions of the Thistle-man in every stop.

I’ve seen the Thistle-man again. I’ve seen him again and again behind the bathrooms at rest stops, in the snack aisle at gas stations, sitting alone at the biggest booths at the smallest roadside bars. Places with one kind of beer on the menu and video poker in the bathroom by the toilet.

Soon after the episode ends, with the narrator declaring to an absent, unresponsive Alice that “this had better be worth it.” She quickly follows that up with a cryptic: “Nothing ever would be.”

“Alice”

The second installment provides a few answers to the questions raised in “Omelet.” For one, we learn about how the narrator felt about Alice and the consequences of the latter’s disappearance. Most importantly, perhaps, listeners discover what precipitated this quest for the missing woman.

Of course, all this is told from the perspective from the narrator. Whether her sentiments were returned or not is impossible to say, as the monologue skirts away from really describing any of Alice’s past actions. We’re informed that she left bewildering phrases scribbled on scraps of papers, on letters hidden beneath clothes, but it’s never explained if Alice enjoyed creepypasta, if she was a calligrapher, if she was meticulous or messy when it came to laundry. We’re told about what the narrator thinks Alice would say, never what Alice did say.

It’s a subtle but eerie distinction that the episode delivers on beautifully. But what sold the second episode to me wasn’t this narrative element, it was Alice’s exploration of a town named Charlatan.

If the Thistle-man was grotesque, Charlatan is outright monstrous, a town that literally won’t let the narrator leave. It changes with every visit, becoming progressively more surreal and frightening.

Everything’s back the way it was before. Everything is clean and new. Customers in the Fairenfield eating pancakes, the teenage girl filling her truck up at the gas station. She is crying. She looks at me furtively, and she is crying.

Everyone is crying.

The woman and her son are leaving room 204 at the Trade Winds Tiki Motel; they are both crying. I know that behind every window on every one of these little tract homes with their neat yards, there’s someone watching me and crying.

As with “Omelet”, the narrator is eventually allowed to escape, although not before a hair-raising meeting with a certain old man. The recording ends. We click to another enigmatic excerpt, where the narrator talks about freedom and how Alice had liberated her. “I am more free now than I have ever been,“ she whispers. “And I am spiraling. I am spiraling across the country. Maybe you are, too.”

And then again, we are confronted with the possibility that the narrator might have never shared a healthy relationship with Alice, that there was something darker in the bond between them. In the closing scene, we hear no words of love:

You may think you’re free, Alice, but you’re not.

You are not free of me.

“Nothing to See”

The third episode appears to largely discard the chronological disorder of its predecessors, which makes a lot of sense given its core conceit: there’s someone else in the truck. In “Nothing to See,” the first half is largely dedicated to the narrator’s experience with that possible intrusion. It’s gratifying to see her be scared but controlled, no more a gung-ho action hero than she is a helpless victim.

The tension builds rapidly. The narrator’s first inspection of her trailer reveals nothing, but the sounds continue, footsteps like “someone were walking on the next floor up at a hotel, or in the hallway of my house, when no one else was supposed to be home.”

“Loud,” she tells us. “And wrong and unwelcome.”

She pushes on, visiting a historic McDonald’s during a bathroom break, commenting on the banality of small-town America as she goes. Through it all, our narrator grows progressively more terrified. The footsteps won’t stop. And then at long last, in the black of night, away from the lights of human civilisation, she gives in to the temptation to check again.

A scream. Sirens. An intermission in loud, unwelcomed noises.

I’ll just tell like it happened. That’s what I’ll do.

I don’t know what it means…what it means for me, what it means for you. I’ll…Jesus!

I can’t tell if it was an oversight on the writer’s part, or if we’ve jumped time again, or even if it’s the case of an unreliable narrator, but suddenly we’re in the parking lot of a Target and the doors are being opened to reveal the Thistle-man. What follows is skin-crawling. Not because of the supernatural elements, although that’s unsettling too, but because of how closely the confrontation resembles a conversation with an abuser.