Aliens Are Coming!: The True Account of the 1938 War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast (review)

The 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds makes for one of the great, if embellished, stories of media history, and McCarthy provides an accessible picture-book look at the phenomenon. Setting the broadcast in terms of its time, the text then gives highlights of the alarming story in excerpts from the script, going on to describe the frightened responses of those who believed the dramatization to be a genuine news bulletin. This is more a storytelling of an event than the "true account" the title claims: unlike Kathleen Krull's The Night the Martians Landed (BCCB 10/03), the text is inclined, ironically, to unquestioningly embrace rather than debunk the legends about the broadcast's effects, and readers will get the strong and mistaken impression that the credulous response was universal. It's nonetheless a well-paced condensation of a complicated event, and readers of an era of savvy media viewing and general skepticism will be intrigued by the audience's belief. Whether human or extraterrestrial, McCarthy's figures are enjoyably bug-eyed and weird, suggesting as much alienation by time as by planetary distance; the effect is further intensified by the choice to show the genuine history in black and white but the dramatized events in color, making the broadcast's story more contemporarily real than the reaction. Krull's book is a more thorough and accurate account of the occurrence, but this would be a lively introduction, and it could certainly provoke some interesting discussion about what might (and does) fool contemporary audiences. Though the end matter confusingly includes jokey plugs for an affiliated website amid real information, an author's note gives more context and background for the occurrence, and a bibliography is included.