Illegal characters in files from '/public' directory

I'm not sure what's going on here, but I cloned the repo, ran npm install, and then npm start and navigated to localhost:3000, where I found a blank page staring back at me. It looks like the files in '/public' aren't being served properly. When I inspect the HTML, the contents for the .css and .js files are just a series of '�' characters.
