Satellite Street is woven through with the theme of transitions. Paul Marden is grappling with the way that a sudden, devastating illness and his slow recovery have made him reevaluate what "normal" is for a man in his sixties who grew up in a time of change that promised better days than the ones he is now living through. Another character's transition involves both gender and spirit; Lelee was born male and wanted to transition to female but the process has been hindered by heart issues. Lelee also believes that she can speak to the dead, although she is skeptical of her own experiences.
The rundown beach town both Paul and Lelee grew up in is itself in a transitional phase: suddenly rediscovered by surfers and other millennials, it has become a magnet for hipsters. The coastal town where Paul and Lelee live now lies between a bridge to another upscale beach town and an area of canals and marshland and has been heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Paul's rented house, on Satellite Street, is one of the few that survived the storm.
Set amongst the context of these thematic elements, the story revolves around Paul's relationship with these places and with Lelee as well as his father, an elderly nursing home patient. It is Paul's father who inadvertently involves him in a feud between the Great Oswaldo, a long-ago children's program host who has become a professional skeptic and Happy Howie, who speaks through Lelee, demanding that Paul settle an old score for him with Oswaldo.
There are two themes to Radiomen. First, if there are aliens interacting with our world, they are likely just as confused about who or what God is as human beings are; and second, whoever they are, they’re probably just as fond of dogs as we are.
Laurie, a woman who works at a bar at Kennedy airport, doesn’t remember that when she was a child, she met an alien on the fire escape of a building where her uncle kept a shortwave radio. The radio is part of a universal network of repeaters maintained by an unknown alien race; they use the network to broadcast prayers into the universe. She meets a psychic who is actually part of a Scientology-like cult called the Blue Awareness, as well as a late-night radio host. All have their own reasons for unraveling the mystery of the lost radio network. Laurie is given a strange dog by her neighbor, an immigrant and a member of the Dogon tribe—people who believe they were visited by aliens long ago and repeat a myth about how the aliens brought dog-like animals with them. All Dogon dogs are supposedly descended from that animal.
As conflict develops between the Blue Awareness leader and the other characters, the Dogon act as an intermediary between the humans, who want to understand why the aliens need the radio network, and the aliens who need the humans to help them find a lost element of the universal network.
“Poet Lerman’s second novel, after Janet Planet, is both a sharp send-up of Scientology and an intriguing aliens-among-us tale.”—Booklist
