Conspiracy fiction

The conspiracy thriller (or paranoid thriller) is a subgenre of the thriller. A common theme in such works is that characters discovering a secretive conspiracy may be unable to tell what is true about the conspiracy, or even what is real: rumors, lies, propaganda, and counter-propaganda build upon one another until what is conspiracy and what is coincidence becomes an undecidable question. The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are often journalists or amateur investigators who find themselves (often inadvertently) pulling on a small thread which unravels a vast conspiracy that ultimately goes "all the way to the top". Conspiracy theory in the US (and echoed in other parts of the world) reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of a number of high-profile scandals and controversies, most notably the Vietnam War, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Chappaquiddick incident, and Watergate. These works exposed what many people regarded as the clandestine... full article at wikipedia