Book Review: Radiomen

Eleanor Lerman
2015
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This novel is...okay. It gives a somewhat new twist to the aliens-are-among-us genre, and kept my interest up a reasonable amount of the time. But it reads a little too much like a young adult novel trying to be grittier and more hard-boiled than it actually is. It’s like Judy Blume trying to be Raymond Chandler. And some of the writing gets a bit sloppy.

The main character, Laurie Perzin, is directionless and isolated. She lives in a down-at-heel part of Queens near warehouses where shady activities go on in the wee hours of the night. Every day she shuttles back and forth from her home to her job as a night-shift bartender at Kennedy airport, keeping her head down, uninvolved in everything around her.

The one interest she has is in ham radio, a hobby borne out of her close childhood relationship with her now-deceased radio enthusiast uncle Avi. But even that hobby is soured by the memory of a vivid dream from that childhood. In the dream, she and Avi were outside the family’s summer vacation rental in Rockaway, trying to listen to signals from Sputnik. Avi lost the signal and went up to the roof to fix the antenna. While he was gone, a gray, fuzzy humanoid form appeared in front of Laurie, telling her not to make a sound while it fixed the radio.

The dream has always disturbed her. So, at the start of the book, without really intending to, Laurie calls in to a psychic appearing on a late-night radio talk show. The psychic, Ravenette, repeats the dream to Laurie unprompted. Laurie hangs up, but the psychic tracks her down and tries to get her to talk about the dream humanoid, and also tries to convert her to a cult-like religion that is almost an exact copy of Scientology called The Blue Awareness.

Ravenette won’t leave Laurie alone. So Laurie turns to the radio show’s host, Jack Shepherd, for help. Jack is sane and sympathetic, but suggests that maybe her “dream” was actually a real incident that she is repressing. Jack thinks that the gray humanoid she saw was an alien, and that there are others on Earth besides the one she saw, and that other people have seen them, and that her uncle might have known about them, too.

In fact, Jack thinks that, Howard Gilmartin, founder of the Blue Awareness, knew about the aliens too, and built his cult around them. Jack’s theory is bolstered when thugs from the Blue Awareness start harassing Laurie, insisting that she submit to “tests” using their “blue box,” which is basically just a box with an electric field in it. She makes the mistake of telling them that she has her own box—one her uncle built to prove that theirs was fake—whereupon they break in and ransack her apartment to steal it.

After the break in, Laurie’s Malian neighbor gives her a watchdog; a very strange but cute and loyal dog that protects her from other incidents and seem to have its own knowledge (and distrust) of the creepos from the Blue Awareness. Jack suspects that the dog is descended from a long line of dogs cared for by the Dogon people of Mali, which may have been given to them originally by the aliens hundreds of years ago as a gift.

Eventually, Laurie is contacted by Raymond Gilmartin, son of Howard and current leader of the Blue Awareness. Raymond thinks she has another piece of her uncle’s radio equipment, a repeater, and he wants it and won’t leave her alone about it. Then there is a weird incident where Ravenette channels an alien who says that it is the aliens who actually need the repeater.

Jack is curious about all of this, so he builds a new repeater when they can’t find Avi’s, and then Jack and Laurie agree to meet Raymond and Ravenette at Laurie’s family’s old vacation rental in Rockaway to give them the repeater, in exchange for them leaving Laurie alone. The Blue Awareness thugs show up and it all threatens to go bad until like a bazillion dogs show up to protect Laurie. And then who should show up but the alien himself, amazing everyone and silencing the Blue Awareness for good.

Lerman’s thesis is an interesting one in principle: that in spite of their superior science, the aliens visiting us are as much in the dark about god and the meaning of life and all that as we are. This could have been turned into a thought-provoking statement about how technology won’t answer those sorts of questions for you, and that no matter how smart you are, you still have to look inside yourself to find meaning in your life. But that does not happen in this novel.

Lerman tries hard to make Laurie tough, but she just doesn’t have the gravitas and attitude to pull off the noir persona it seems that Lerman is going for. She always comes across like a continually disillusioned kid. And many of her movements seem pointless, or at least needlessly slow; like her first visit to her family’s old beach rental on Rockaway, or to her uncle’s grave.

In keeping with a noir atmosphere, Lerman includes huge amounts of gritty scenery description, especially of the seedier parts of New York City, which in a Dashiell Hammett novel would give the story a crucial atmosphere, but which here get, well, boring. Everything is continually soggy, gray, forlorn.

And there are a ton of similes, often combined with comically long run-on sentences, that are pretty hard to read. To wit:

“Dr. Carpenter turned to look toward the window, where a block of dusty summer sunlight seemed to sit on the sill like a package someone had forgotten to bring inside.”

“The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded facade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.”

The Blue Awareness is a little too bare-facedly and disappointingly an imitation of Scientology—even down to the Ted Merrill / Tom Cruise star spokesman—without any real significant alteration.

And the ending is awkwardly unsubtle. Characters are supposed to grow and change over the course of a novel, but it is supposed to be self-evident; not proclaimed. At the end of Radiomen, Laurie comes right out and tells the reader that she has changed from a person plodding head down through life to a curious person alive with possibilities. (Which isn’t actually all that apparent.) And, as a bonus, Laurie lists the other key characters and tells us how they have changed, too. It clanks hard.

If anything rescues this novel at all, it is the dogs. They provide the moments of real heart and meaning; they have their own agendas and personalities, and are some of the best characters in the book. If only they were the protagonists as well.