Sunday, December 31, 2017

Government Conspiracy Fiction Books You Won't Want To Put Down

By Ann Lee


Plenty of people are familiar with The Thirty-Nine Steps because of the many different adaptations it has been made into, but only those who have followed the story very carefully are able to understand what the mysterious title means. This was one of the original government conspiracy fiction books, and it was published in 1915 and written by John Buchan. This is the first book with his iconic action hero Richard Hannay.

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.

In 1943, Graham Greene wrote a novel called Ministry of Fear that would change the way people thought of the conspiracy thriller genre. In this book, Greene tells a story about how the Nazi used their influence to gain information that could be used to blackmail individuals. The meaning behind the title of this book becomes clear in the reading.

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.

Whenever a tragic or controversial even happens in the public's eye, there are always those who are prone to make speculations whenever there is any level of uncertainty in the facts. John F. Kennedy's assassination was certainly one of these events, and Winter Kills is a definitive book about the events and the theories. Richard Condon's story explores what happened as well as what conspirators think happened.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy came into existence thanks to the work of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. These two men got together to write three books that were published over the course of several years in the late 60s and early 70s, and combines genres that were new and controversial at the time like psychedelia. This collection is one of the most widely read in the genre.

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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