Hidden Agendas: Cults, Corruption and Conspiracy in the Modern Thriller

Secrets fester in isolated communities. Corporations conceal monstrous truths. Grief curdles into vengeance. In this high-stakes thriller panel, Sarah Gailey, Jendia Gammon, Luke Goebel, and Paddy Hirsch explore conspiracy as both engine and mirror, reflecting our deepest anxieties about belonging, power, and truth. In Make Me Better, Gailey crafts an eerily seductive psychological thriller set on a remote island promising healing, transformation, and the end of suffering. As an exclusive festival draws seekers desperate for connection, the novel interrogates cult psychology, toxic self-improvement culture, and the terrifying allure of surrendering autonomy in exchange for belonging. Gammon’s Atacama, longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award, blends speculative horror and corporate conspiracy thriller. A researcher investigating a colleague’s suspicious death uncovers shadowy agents and an inhuman threat hiding in plain sight. The novel fuses scientific inquiry with creeping dread, asking what happens when institutions meant to foster knowledge instead weaponize it. Goebel, known for his boundary-pushing fiction and screenwriting, brings a raw, literary intensity to the thriller form in Kill Dick. In this dark and satirical collection of short stories, obsession, violence, and fractured identities blur the line between perpetrator and victim while exposing the stories we tell ourselves to survive complicity and guilt. In PRIMED, Hirsch delivers a transatlantic revenge thriller that begins with a decades-old bombing and a single photograph. As a grieving father hunts the man he believes responsible, the chase stretches from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles, unraveling into espionage, political shadows, and the devastating costs of living for vengeance. Across their work, these authors probe the architecture of conspiracy: closed communities that promise salvation, corporations that distort truth, governments that obscure accountability, and individuals whose private grief fuels public violence. Moderated by podcast host of Twisted Passages and Dark Obsessions author Marie Sutro, join us for a conversation discussing writing paranoia in an era of misinformation, sustaining suspense while deepening character psychology, and why the thriller remains one of the most urgent genres for confronting systems of power, and ourselves.