"An impressively incisive and comprehensive account of the way suspicion continues to haunt modern democratic societies. Beckman ranges over an extraordinary body of material in this consistently illuminating book."—Timothy Melley, Miami University "Beckman does a terrific job of seeing how, as the conspiracy theorist believes, everything is connected. An ambitious and exceptionally wide-ranging discussion of paranoia as a way of making sense of power, truth, and identity in recent decades."—Peter Knight, University of Manchester "Beckman's technique demonstrates the significance the paranoid chronotrope offers to a complete understanding of truth, identity, and power in American society, politics, and culture.... To be sure, this rich and clever framework provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the paranoid chronotope—a concept that is destined to become a key one in twenty-first century literary and cultural theory."—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Modern Fiction Studies