Here are 100 books that Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories fans have personally recommended if you like
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the hidden histories of everyday things, especially in media and popular culture. (Who were those people on TV laugh tracks? Where did Muzak records come from?) A career in broadcasting only sharpened this interest, informing two decades of writing and performing.
Like most Americans, I grew up hearing the codified version of the Charles Manson/Helter Skelter saga, so when I saw yet another Manson book, I had two thoughts: "This sounds like a cash-grab," and, "Ugh...it's probably some lunatic conspiracy theory."
Suffice it to say, I was wrong—dead wrong—on both counts. By now, there's a good chance you've heard the backstory to Tom O'Neill's book: how he came to write it, how long it took him to finish, and (most importantly) what he learned about the Manson case. If you don't know any of this, take my advice and go in blind. CHAOS will floor you.
As featured on The Joe Rogan Experience ______________________________ A journalist's twenty-year obsession with the Manson murders leads to shocking new conspiracy theories about the FBI's involvement in this fascinating re-evaluation of one of the most infamous cases in American history.
Twenty years ago, reporting for a routine magazine piece about the infamous Manson murders, journalist Tom O'Neill didn't expect to find anything new. But the discovery of horrifying new evidence kick-started an obsession and his life's work. What had he unearthed and what did it mean: why was there surveillance by intelligence agents? Why did the police make these particular…
I’m a law professor who, among other things, writes about the culture and law of secrecy. I’ve written two books: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, the second edition of which was published in 2008, and The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (2017). I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I teach at the University of Florida.
The most influential book on conspiracy theories, by any measure, published in 1966. Its title shouts Hofstadter’s thesis: A longstanding strain in American politics is marginal, dangerous, and a manifestation of political paranoia. Although countless op-ed writers have reduced his thesis to equate conspiracy theory to a paranoid mind, Hofstadter offers in the book’s first half more than simple social psychological analysis of the far right of the 1950s and 1960s, which included Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and the John Birch Society.
One of the preeminent mid-twentieth century U.S. historians, Hofstadter wrote wonderfully, engaged in big ideas, and if his work ultimately needs updating and deserves critique, Paranoid Style set the terms for a debate that continues today about conspiracy theories’ role in our political order.
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and…
I’m a law professor who, among other things, writes about the culture and law of secrecy. I’ve written two books: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, the second edition of which was published in 2008, and The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (2017). I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I teach at the University of Florida.
Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style is more a work of historiography than history and attempted to explain the rise of a right-wing “paranoia” to a liberal intellectual audience in the early 1960s. By contrast, Jesse Walker’s book offers a more detailed, engaging, and sympathetic history of U.S. conspiracy theories and the individuals and groups who have made and circulated them. It’s funny and deadpan, with a keen eye for subcultural details and the singular American oddballs that have traveled from the margins to the mainstream. As Walker demonstrates, Qanon is not the first example of a bizarre, syncretic set of beliefs that has attracted a surprisingly large number of adherents.
The United States of Paranoia is a history of America's demons. Conspiracy theories, Walker explains, aren't just a feature of the fringe: They've been a potent force across the political spectrum, in the center as well as the extremes, from the colonial era to the present. Walker argues that conspiracy stories need to be read not just as claims to be either believed or debunked but as folklore. When a tale takes hold, it says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of…
I read widely and in many genres, so coming up with a thematic list was a difficult task. However, in working on my forthcoming novel Dead Ends, in which a quiet neighborhood descends into paranoia and insanity driven by fear, politics, and technology, I sought out novels that engaged with conspiratorial thinking and violence. I admire writers who don’t hold back and fully engage with their characters and material, particularly if it means going to dark, imaginative and strange places in their work. Please keep an eye out for Dead Ends, coming from Flame Tree Press in 2023.
This trilogy collection is perhaps the granddaddy of conspiracy novels because, frankly, it encompasses nearly all of them — at least at the time it was written — then weaves in fictional mythos, occult religions, fascist political movements, and a post-modern deconstruction of itself. It’s equal parts fun, crazy, confusing, and challenging. The fact that Shea and Wilson had the capacity to create such a mammoth work encompassing so many far-reaching, interconnecting lines of conspiratorial thought makes it work to behold, not only for its brilliance but also for its influence. This is not The DaVinci Code; it’s bigger, deeper, more imaginative, and more complex.
Filled with sex and violence--in and out of time and space--the three books of The Illuminatus are only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the coverups of our time--from who really shot the Kennedys to why there's a pyramid on a one-dollar bill.
While I love straight-up fiction and read plenty of novels, I’ve always been just as interested in art as I have been in writing. The further into my writing career I get, the more it becomes obvious that art and illustration are just as vital to the way I want to tell my stories. I did the covers for my first few books and started experimenting with illustrating them as well with The Writhing Skies, creating a very strange blend of splatterpunk horror and Betty Boop-inspired illustration. Soft Places is a further step in the direction of telling stories in a way that’s a little different.
This book is absolutely wild. It purports to be an adaption of an over-the-top gorefest of a movie, plagued by conspiracy theories. Full of footnotes and behind-the-scenes anecdotes and autobiographical details about how the book itself came to be, it not only supposedly adapts a film but tells a far darker hidden story and is overall a lot of dark and spooky fun.
Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI is one of the most infamous slasher-movie sequels of the 1980s. Known for its over-the-top gore effects, bizarre and psychedelic campground killer plot—and its legacy as a lightning rod for conspiracy theories concerning everything from UFOs and alien abductions to 9/11 and a secret cabal at the heart of world power. This book contains a complete, authorized adaptation of the infamous cult slasher movie as well as the secret history of the behind-the-scenes drama and high-strange events that inspired the filmmakers, complete with footnotes and autobiographical anecdotes. Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI: The Official Novelization…
I read widely and in many genres, so coming up with a thematic list was a difficult task. However, in working on my forthcoming novel Dead Ends, in which a quiet neighborhood descends into paranoia and insanity driven by fear, politics, and technology, I sought out novels that engaged with conspiratorial thinking and violence. I admire writers who don’t hold back and fully engage with their characters and material, particularly if it means going to dark, imaginative and strange places in their work. Please keep an eye out for Dead Ends, coming from Flame Tree Press in 2023.
Nick Mamatas never writes a typical novel and his latest offering is no exception. Built on the very real rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding mass shooting events in the United States, Mamatas' work offers hints and innuendos throughout of an invisible force seeking to create chaos, death, and destruction in collusion with a conspiracy theorist radio host fanning the flames. Like a real-life conspiracy theory, it’s all connected — somehow. Mamatas’ ability to draw a plot line and themes so at odds with our general perception of reality, the story, sadly, begins to reflect our real world of conspiracy theories and political paranoia in what has become a bat-shit age of American life.
"There was video of the second shooter. There was video."
In the first reports of every mass shooting, there's always mention of a second shooter-two sets of gunshots, a figure seen fleeing the scene-and they always seem to evaporate as events are pieced together.
Commissioned by a fringe publisher to investigate the phenomenon, journalist Mike Karras finds himself tailed by drones, attacked by a talk radio host, badgered by his all-knowing (and maybe all-powerful) editor, and teaming up with an immigrant family of conspiracy buffs.
Together, they uncover something larger and stranger than anyone could imagine-a technomystical plot to 'murder…
As a longtime Angeleno, I’ve read a lot about the dark underbelly of our dysfunctional metropolis, both in the news and in fiction. I try to incorporate the City of Angels as a strong presence in my writing, and when I read other writers who have put Los Angeles at the center, it gives me a sense of things the way they really are, a glimpse at a deeper reality. I see the detectives in LA noir and crime fiction as inextricably intertwined with the city, their weaknesses, and their emotional quandaries emerging from this place.
I’d be afraid to meet this detective, Slater, in a dark alley, as he’s unpredictable and has a quick temper. At the same time I have to admit he’s the kind of guy I’d want to date. Smart and competent in his investigative work, Slater is a mass of contradictions, a textbook sex addict and in complete denial about it, plus he drinks too much. His pugilistic approach to the world evolves through the series, and in this book his slightly warped moral compass has him working to outsmart the cops to track down a violent conspiracy theorist.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with…
I first became interested in how societies grapple with extremism when I studied abroad in Germany and learned about post-World War II education about the Holocaust. I then spent two decades studying and writing about how German schools were working to combat rising far-right extremism in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, I find there is much to learn globally, including in my own country of the U.S., from the German approach to combating extremism, which is rooted in the idea of “defensive democracy”—the notion that we can’t only combat the fringe itself, but also must equip the mainstream with the tools to be resilient to it.
Extremist movements today are not just driven by violent hate and ideologies—they are also deeply embedded in a wide range of conspiracy theories. Muirhead and Rosenblum’s book helped me understand how those conspiracy theories spread and why they are so dangerous to democracies around the world—especially for the ways they disorient individuals, delegitimize expertise, and carry antisemitic and Islamophobic ideas into the mainstream.
How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy-and what can be done about it
Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new-conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, how it undermines democracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
I am a political scientist, a professor emeritus at Webster University, with scholarly publications about Latin American and U.S. politics. My interest in conspiracy theories was piqued by a reviewer who dismissed my book on the “democratic façade” of U.S. politics as a “conspiracy theory.” I took umbrage and denied being a “conspiracy theorist.” Years later, conversing with a colleague about Oliver Stone’s JFK, I dismissed his doubts about the lone gunman theory as a conspiracy theory. He asked whether I would similarly dismiss questions about official stories regarding assassinations in South Asia or Latin America. This all set me on the path to studying the role of conspiracies.
I found this book a most accessible, comprehensive and incisive look at QAnon, one of the most baffling mass movements to have blasted into American political culture.
For those of us who live outside the reach of these cult-like believers in a raft of fantastical conspiracy theories, what baffles us is that unlike cults, which are typically withdrawn from mainstream society, QAnon reaches into our most intimate friend and family circles.
For me, where the book shines is in tracing the early appeal, its spiraling growth via the internet, and the links to radical right populists. This book is our best guide into the heart of darkness of Trumpian America.
"I hope everyone reads this book. It has become such a crucial thing for all of us to understand." —Erin Burnett, CNN
"An ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole that is QAnon. It even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit." —Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm
Its messaging can seem cryptic, even nonsensical, yet for tens of thousands of people, it explains everything: What is QAnon, where did it come from, and is the Capitol insurgency a sign of where it’s going next?
I’ve spent the past ten years reporting and writing true crime narratives about teenagers and hate, first in The 57 Bus and now in Accountable. My research has led me into some fascinating places and has left me convinced that we cannot prevent what we don’t understand. In both books I found that the young people who harmed others weren’t the stereotypical grimacing loners I’d always associated with hate and extremism. Instead, they were imitating behaviors that we see all around us. Being young, with brains that aren’t fully developed in important ways, and lacking the life experience that teaches us a more nuanced understanding of the world, they are ripe for radicalization.
After watching both a close friend and a relative get radicalized through online disinformation, I realized that no one is immune, no matter how smart or how educated, if they don’t have the tools to recognize disinformation when it comes their way.
Media scholar Samuel C. Spitale has written a compulsively readable and highly entertaining explanation of what disinformation is and how to recognize and combat it. The propaganda mills are churning out disinformation faster than ever before and even those of us who think we’re too smart to be fooled are vulnerable.
The average person receives 4,000 to 10,000 media messages a day. It s no wonder we struggle to separate the news from the noise and fact from fiction but in these unprecedented times, it s essential to democracy that we do. For anyone struggling to figure out how to live and vote their values, How to Win the War on Truth is here to help. You ll learn: The history of propaganda, from Edward Bernays to Fox News Why simple messages are so powerful How social messaging creates unconscious biases Who profits from propaganda How propaganda is manufactured and delivered…
