every horror writer in history wanted what the 19th floor subplot in the Wayside School books had
Also the gentlemen with the black attaché case who offer you the choice between being safe or being free and the dead rats who live in the basement.
I have no idea what Wayside School is
It’s a trilogy of absurdist children’s novels published by Louis Sachar (the author of Holes) about a school that was supposed to be one storey with thirty rooms but is actually thirty storeys with a room on each floor because the builders were holding the plans sideways (and apparently this is how architecture works). Each book consists of a series of thirty loosely interrelated short stories about the students on the thirtieth floor, and there are a bunch of weird anomalous things that become running gags throughout the novels and, actually, now that I think about it, I can definitely see how Night Vale would have been inspired by this
Sideways Stories from Wayside School is basically “American Elementary School Gothic”.