Recommended Reading

The Obvious Ones

- H. P. Lovecraft

plus, in no particular order,

- August Derleth

- Robert Bloch

- Robert E. Howard

- Clark Ashton Smith

- Arthur Machen

- Lord Dunsany

plus the collection Delta Green: Alien Intelligence

AUTHORS

the whole opus of the following can be considered pertinent reading

- Tom Clancy - modern warfare and spycraft

- Len Deighton - traditional spycraft, the older titles are highly recommended

- Philip K. Dick - paranoia

- Graham Greene - spycraft, moral ambiguity

- John LeCarrÃ© - traditional spycraft

- Fritz Leiber - the Lankhmar stories have Dreamlands potential, while the horror works update some of HPL's themes.

- Alastair MacLean: Almost anything is likewise worth a look (particularly "Ice Station Zebra" and "Where Eagles Dare" - both of which spawned excellent films: Incidentally, with a couple of minor modifications, Where Eagles Dare would be the all time best ever WWII Karotechia-busting scenario... I'm drooling even thinking about it!).

NON-FICTION

James Bamford "The Puzzle Palace"

FICTION (?)

- Iain Banks - especially "The Wasp Factory"

- Clive Barker: "The Great and Secret Show", "Cabal" and "Weaveworld" offer good Dreamlands suggestions.

- Greg Bear:  "Blood Music" (lone nut researcher injects himself with "intelligent" white blood cells) which was very well done as a short story (it's in one of his anthologies), but IMHO, slightly less well done as a full length novel. Either way, one scene bears (oops! no pun intended) a distinct resemblance to a certain bathroom incident we are all familiar with....

"Psychlone", also "The Infinity Concerto" for Dreamlands ideas

- James Blish: "Black Easter" and "The Day after Judgement"

- Ray Bradbury : "The Wind" (Short Story) from the October Season, - For anybody thinking of running a DG vs. the Wendigo.

- Martin Caidin: "Jericho 52" ("Four daredevil adventurers, a Third Reich ghost bomber, a flight out of the past to money, power and glory!") and "Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates" (Hokey title, but Caidin tells a believable tale of adventure, conspiracy, and manmade flying discs in the 1930s, and his afterword mentions Henri Caonda (who built a jet plane in 1910), airships, and "lenticular aerodynes"...)

- Ramsey Campbell: "The Parasite"

- John Case: "The Genesis Code". Interesting premise based on human cloning and Vatican/Jesuit hit men, but unfortunately rather obvious plot twists and technical flaws. Worth a look for wholesale plot lifting though.

- Peter Corris -"Pockerface" (and sequels)

- James Dickey: "Deliverance", redneck-fueled paranoia

- Thomas Disch: "Camp Concentration", on USA Govt.-run camps, human experimentation, viruses and paranoia

- Disch, McDaniel and Stine: "The Prisoner" novelizations, acute paranoia

- Robert Doherty: "Area 51"

- Umberto Eco "Foucault's Pendulum" - this is more Unknown Armies than DELTA GREEN, but a good way how to set occult theme to a story in modern times

- James Ellroy - police procedural and corruption by mundane factors, suggested novels include "Black Daliah" and "L.A. Confidential"

- Valerio Evangelisti's "Nichiolas Eymerich - Inquisitor" - probably the only one that has been translated in English but the entire Eymerich series and the American trilogy is worth reading. The story jump between the 1300 and modern times in a mix of horror, heresy, and science fiction.

- Raymond Feist: "Faerie Tale"

- Frederick Forsyth: "Day of the Jackal". Anyone who doesn't know what this is all about ought to be ashamed of themselves. A fine example of deep cover and what a lone assassin is capable of. The film isn't half bad either - but steer well clear of the shoddy re-make travesty "The Jackal" featuring Richard ("is that a hamster in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?") Gere as a cute cuddly IRA man and Bruce Willis. Enough said.

Also by Forsyth is the "Dogs of War" (again steer clear of the movie) which tells you all you need to know about hiring and training mercenaries. The "Odessa File" again by Forsyth is well worth a look too.

- Dion Fortune: "The Secrets of Dr. Taverner" and "The Deamon Lover"

- J. Grady: "Six Days of the Condor"

- Robert Harris: "Enigma" and "Fatherland". The former dealing with the British codebreakers of Bletchley Park during WWII (should be required reading for anyone wanting to play a cryptanalyst - it's absoluetly fascinating) and the latter about what might have happened if the Nazis actually won the war (scary and highly beleivable).

- Thomas Harris - "Red Dragon", "Silence of the Lambs"

- Richard P. Henrick: "Dive to Oblivion" (Nuclear subs in the Bermuda Triangle, Russian scientists messing around with alien (?) interdimensional tech...)

- James Herbert : "48", describing a world devastated by the final bacteriological German retaliation weapon. Fast paced.

- Philip Kerr: "Berlin Noir" (collection of three novels set in Berlin in the '30s)

- Stephen King: "The Mist" and "Jerusalem's Lot" (Both Novellas), "the Dark Tower Series" (for a Western-tinged take on the Dreamlands)

- Stephen King and Peter Straub: "The Talisman"

- Andrew Klavan: "The Uncanny" features weird cults, ancient legends and Nazis

- T.E.D Klein: "Black Man with a Horn" (Novella), "Ceremonies", "Dark Gods" (collection)

- Nigel Kneale: the "Quatermass" novelizations

- John Lawton -"Black Out", "Old Flames"

- Brian Lumley: "Necroscope"

- Richard Lupoff: "Lovecraft's Book"; Lovecraft-Nazi connection, secret Nazi subs base off the coast. HPL swashes his buckle (sort of).

- Kim Newman: "The Original Doctor Shade" & "Famous Monsters" (collections), "The Quorum" (avatar of N.?), "Bad Dreams" (Dreamland connection), "Coppola's Dracula" (novella)

- George Orwell: "1984", the basics of paranoia

- Mervyn Peake - the "Gormenghast Trilogy" has a perfect Dreamlands atmosphere and is HIGHLY recommended. Get it and read it NOW.

- Arturo Perez Reverte: "The Club Dumas" and "Skin of the Drum"

- Richard Preston: "The Cobra Event", "The Hot Zone"

- John Allen Price: "Doomsday Ship" (Just prior to the Ardennes Offensive, Allied special ops goes after the (luckily fictional) \_third\_ "Bismarck" class battleship -- "Frederick the Great", which has been fitted with launchers for V-1s (carrying biowar agents) and sent to bombard New York.)

Theodore Roszak: "Flicker", a secret history of the movies

- Eric Frank Russell: "Wasp" (A SF novel, Earth vs. the pointy-eared Sirian Combine, but the Sirians are actually thinly disguised WWII Japanese.  Russell worked alongside of Ian Fleming in British Intelligence during WWII, dreaming up nasty tricks to play on the enemy, and "Wasp" represents his ideas on how one man, with the right tools and training, can confound an army. As Jack Chalker says in the foreword to one of my copies, "Beyond the spaceships to get him there, our hero finds himself in a world resembling wartime Japan more than anything futuristic, his Sirian culture more foreign than exotic. What he does to them, and how he does it, is what Russell wanted to do to the Japanese... We cannot believe that one man can have such an impact, yet watching, step by step, we see not purple aliens but our own culture being rattled in just the fashion the Sirians are here. We know it will work..." If possible, try to find the Ballantine edition -- it contains about 10,000 words worth of stuff that was edited out of the original Avalon Books edition to bring the page count down to 189!)

- Carl Sagan: "Contact"

- John Sandford:"The Night Crew" etc

- Lucius Shepard: "Life During Wartime"

- Dan Simmons: The "Hyperion" novels, for alien menace and AIs, "Song of Kali" for Indian paranoia, "Night Children" for Rumenian conspiracies, biological mutations and Eastern block vampires. The "Lovedeath" collection is also suggested.

- John Steakley: "Vampire$"

- Whitley Streiber: "The Night Church"

- Whitley Strieber "Communion" - the supposedly factual book on his abductions

- Victor Suvorow "Aquarium" - loosely based on author's life, a storylife of GRU officer spying in the West in 1970s

- Kurt Vonnegut: "Mother Night" & "Slaughterhouse Five" bring paranoia and surrealism to Second World War

- Dennis Wheatley: "The Devil Rides Out"; much of D.W.'s output makes for good Call of Cthulhu resources.

- Robert Anton Wilson:  "The Earth Will Shake", "The Widow's Son", "Nature's God" and someday - "The World Turned Upside-Down" collectively referred to as the "Historical Illuminatus". Written in a more accesible style than the Illuminatus trilogy and acting as a sort of prequel to it and The Shroedinger's Cat trilogy (both available through Amazon.com but seldom seen in the wild).   Readers of the earlier works will recognize the family names of Celine, Maldonaldo, Polinari, Drake, and Moon, as well as a host of others.

The relevance to DG? In addition to the historical tidbits that generate at least one scenario idea per chapter and the bibliographies; the atmosphere and feel of the books, the insights into how a character can live surrounded by conspiracies and cover stories without ever knowing any consistent "truth".  Golden Dawn fans take note, this was written for you, too.

- F. Paul Wilson: "The Keep", Nazis vs. Real Evil, the Mythos has a walk-on cameo.

- John Wyndham : "The Kraken Wakes" - The Kraken could be read as Deep Ones. The events in this book could detail the first steps of Cthulhu Rising. This book has a different American title (which I cannot remember)

- Roger Zelazny: "A Night in the Lonesome October"