Before long, his interest becomes a magnet; first a UFO finds Danny, and then a cadre of teenage investigators, working feverishly to unravel an ever-deepening conspiracy, adopts him as one of their own. Swept up in the intrigue and smitten by a female comrade-in-arms, Danny strikes out on a quest that will leave all his friends dead or in hiding, and carry him beyond the confines of time and the known regions of the universe. Before it’s all over, he will brave the eerie subterranean realm of an ancient alien race known as the dero, pilot a flying saucer to the dark side of the moon, and smuggle his half-human child — destined, perhaps, to restore the troubled planet’s balance — across the fortified border separating Jordan from Israel.
Except that it’s all in Danny’s head, flowing through his pen, and into the novel’s titular journal — an invented battleground on which he grapples with his demons and probes the limits and the nature of belief. This is a twist of sorts, but it’s one the book telegraphs early on, and reveals outright well before the halfway point. Once that revelation comes, and the game becomes drawing the connections between Danny’s mostly off-the-page real life and its fantastic, journaled corollaries, all the tension goes out of the narrative.
On a structural level, Halperin has painted himself into a corner: “Journal of a UFO Investigator’’ is written in first person, from Danny’s perspective, so there is no way for the reveal to come dramatically, no chance for the thought that Danny is inventing his adventures to dawn gradually on the reader. Danny himself has to pull back the curtain, repeatedly and clumsily, and this undermines the whole conceit.
