New Novel Pulls Back the Curtain on 1970's Radio

RADIO ONLINE | Wednesday, June 4, 2025 | 6:13pm CT

Top 40 Honeypot

A new novel by former Top 40 radio insider Janet Merran offers a gritty and unsettling look at the darker undercurrents of the radio industry's so-called golden era. "Top 40 Honeypot," published by Minneapolis-based Calumet Editions, arrives amid renewed interest in industry abuse stories, with reviewers noting its timely parallels to current headlines, including the Diddy trial.

Set in 1974, Top 40 Honeypot follows the rise and fall of Donnie Dixon, a program director at a high-profile Top 40 station who quickly finds that the glitz of the business hides a disturbing reality of exploitation, corruption, and occult practices. Told in the form of a fictitious memoir, each chapter is framed around the hit song of the week, immersing readers in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of music radio.

The novel also centers on Jackie, a young woman hired under suspicious circumstances and ultimately caught in a web of manipulation and abuse. Merran explores how women entering the male-dominated media landscape of the 1970s were often used as pawns in schemes they didn't understand-described by one character as a world where "everyone was either predator or prey."

Merran, who worked in Top 40 radio during that era, blends her firsthand knowledge with fiction to create what early reviewers are calling a "riveting thriller" and "a page-turner that cuts beneath the glitter of the Hit Parade."

"With all that's going on in the Diddy trial, Top 40 Honeypot is a relevant, timely, and insightful read," said journalist and critic Tom Siebert. Author Christopher Loring Knowles called it "a cold, hard, and unstinting look at how ambition, greed, cowardice, and lust made for a dark witches' brew."

"Top 40 Honeypot" is available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook formats via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. More information is available at janetmerran.com.