Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Government Conspiracy Fiction Books That Will Make You Question Everything

By Ann Lee


The Thirty-Nine Steps is one of the first books to explore the genre of the paranoid thriller. It was written by John Buchan and came out in 1915, and is the first of his government conspiracy fiction books that features the character of Richard Hannay, who appears in Buchan's other works. This ambiguously titled novel follows Hannay's unlikely adventures, full of action and heroics.

While there is a wealth of great novels about conspiracies that have to do with entire countries falling prey to an evil plot, sometimes it is more interesting and easier to understand when the plot takes place on a small scale. Dashiell Hammett's short story "Nightmare Town" takes this approach. The story is about the deadly mystery of a small town conspiring to commit insurance fraud.

The Ministry of Fear is a book that came out in 1943 and was written by Graham Greene. The backdrop of World War II and the Nazi regime made many readers very interested in this book when it was first published. It had to do with the way Nazis would blackmail individuals into cooperating with them.

Many people have heard of The Manchurian Candidate because of the film by the same title featuring Denzel Washington, but plenty of others knew about it long before that. Richard Condon wrote the novel in 1959, and the fear of communism definitely had a big influence on the writing of this book and its reception. The protagonist is subject to brainwashing to make him carry out an assassination.

John F. Kennedy's assassination was a tragedy, and an event that left a lot of people wondering who really did it. While conspirators can speculate to no end without ever having any proof of their beliefs, Richard Condon chose to express his feelings in a story called Winter Kills. This dark tale covers both what is known to have happened and goes into theories as well.

When Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson got together to write a book about counterculture and conspiracies, they might not have known just how big it was going to become. Their work became known as The Illuminatus! Trilogy, three novels that are usually printed as one anthology. Published from 1969 to 1971, their work combines genres like psychedelia, horror, and comedy.

Thomas Pynchon's novella called The Crying Lot 49 may be a relatively quick read, but it is a literary journey worth taking. Published in 1966, it is full of cultural references out of that colorful time that Pynchon is very prone to making. The plot in this story has to do with two postal services that were pitted against each other due to a conflict dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Gravity's Rainbow is one of the deepest and most complex novels a reader might come across when looking for a paranoid thriller. Although there is a large number of characters and the book deals with topics that are at a very high level, if the reader is up for the challenge, it can be very illuminating. When the book came out, many people saw it to be too obscene or not comprehensible at all.




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