In a moment when even a cursory review of the day’s headlines conjures dread from every corner, perhaps the least surprising trend in fiction is the popularity of the paranoia thriller.
“Paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind,” Stephen King — no stranger to psychic horrors — wrote in “Danse Macabre,” his critical overview of (and ode to) the horror genre. If amid the doom-scrolling and 24-hour bludgeoning by notifications, you’ve managed to keep your mind from occasional overstrain, kudos to you. For the rest of us, there’s relief to be found in a quality thriller: When reality feels fraught, sometimes the best way to escape is to drop yourself in the shoes of a fictional character, and dial everything up to 11.
First-rate fiction often comes out of moments of societal unease — see: George Orwell’s “1984,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” to name a few — and continues to be relevant generations later as readers use the fiction of the past to cope with the concerns of the present. These books don’t introduce new fears: They capture the heartbeat of dread we already feel, pass it through a literary sieve and season it with a bit of science fiction or horror along the way.
Here are a few of my favorites — each a fascinating time capsule of American fear.
The Golden Apples of the Sun
by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury expertly mined paranoia in his writing, layering his tales with warnings about the perils of mob mentality, censorship and distrust of experts. This collection of short fiction, his third, includes “The Pedestrian,” an unsettling gem of a story set in an imagined 2053 that, with its artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, feels eerily close to our 2025.
Leonard Mead likes to go for walks at night — an innocuous pastime that seems aberrant in a world where people largely stay indoors, captivated by their screens. When Leonard encounters a robotic police car on one of his strolls, the A.I. law enforcement can’t comprehend his disturbingly human behavior, earning Leonard a trip to the Psychiatric Center for Regressive Tendencies.
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