Paranoid Storytelling

After Judson Merrill publishes a story that becomes fodder for conspiracy theorists and fuels a violent clash, he's desperate to write something--anything--that rises above our toxic online hysteria. When he discovers a daring and brilliant researcher studying the poisonous effects of conspiracy theories, Merrill is convinced she holds the key to diagnosing America's demented culture. But shortly after she agrees to an interview, she vanishes, and any possible diagnosis vanishes with her. Merrill's search for her takes him across Europe and turns up a trail of unsettling research and confounding clues. The story he pieces together offers an explosive explanation for our collective sickness and reveals the many ways in which our media, our communications, and our very beliefs have become fatally diseased. If he can unravel the sprawling conspiracy behind our affliction, he'll still have to convince a paranoid world in which everyone believes what they want to believe.

Judson Merrill has long been inspired by the way the novel began--as a fraud and a thief, stealing and repurposing popular storytelling forms. Merrill's fiction seeks to make the ways the internet has changed storytelling visible. Unafraid of big, societal questions, he is attracted to dynamic collaborations. He has made an art book with renowned artist Rebecca Goodale and is currently co-producing a film he wrote (Cult College) about the anxious and uncertain future bearing down on young people and their desperate attempts to navigate a hyper-online world and the destruction of the institutions meant to support them. A graduate of Brown University and Brooklyn College's MFA in Fiction, Merrill's work engages with our most pressing questions while also exposing how form impacts how we process information and make sense of the world.