A lens for reading the world. Dialectical materialism, capital as cosmic horror, and the parapolitics of deep events, with fiction and non-fiction given equal weight.
Paranoid Reading is a way of looking, not a genre. It starts from a materialist premise: history is made by forces of production, by class, and by the institutions built to protect accumulation, and those forces do much of their work where nobody is meant to look. The paranoia here is disciplined. The question is never who is pulling the strings. It is whose interests an arrangement serves, and what it has to hide to keep serving them.
Begin with the material base. Read events as the working out of contradictions between classes, between capital and labour, between a state's public face and its interests. Not great men and not secret masters, but structures with motives, and the people who staff them.
Lovecraft's terror is the discovery that the universe is run by vast, indifferent powers the human mind was not built to perceive. That is a fair description of capital: a non human process, older than anyone living, that reorganises bodies, landscapes and states to feed itself and is only ever glimpsed in fragments. Weird fiction gives us words for what economics calls the weather.
The covert record: stay behind armies, intelligence agencies in the drug trade, assassinations, the narco netherworld, the private armies that replaced them. Deep events are the ones the official story cannot explain without the hidden layer. They are researched here through inquiries, archives and scholarship, and every source is graded for what it can bear.
The novel often arrives first. De Maria wrote the strategy of tension before the archives opened, Ellroy made the covert sixties legible, Pynchon mapped the cartel. Fiction lets us conceive what the record later confirms, and warns us when the record itself is being dramatised.
The record tells us what can be shown. Parliamentary papers, peer reviewed work, reportage, testimony, each marked for the kind of claim it makes. A reading on this site always holds both: the novel that imagines the machine and the document that proves it exists.
Sources that carry every chosen topic rank first. With more than one topic, each one is guaranteed a place if the library holds a match.
No single format takes more than about two thirds of the list, so fiction and the record stay in conversation. Untick a format to leave it out entirely.