This chapter examines William Burroughs’ complex relationship to paranoia and conspiracy thinking, tracing how these motifs function not merely as ideological content but as structuring principles of his literary imagination. Chris Fleming argues that Burroughs’ work defies categorization as straightforward “conspiracy theory” and instead constructs a worldview where causality is overdetermined by magical cosmology, genre logics, and a suspicion of all systems. From Naked Lunch to Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs explores power through occult forces, viral metaphors, and political subterfuge, yet his narratives ultimately resist resolution and totalizing explanatory schemes. Fleming contrasts Burroughs’ conspiratorial aesthetics with the “paranoid style” of the political right, including modern manifestations like QAnon, showing how Burroughs anticipates and subverts these frameworks through irony, ambivalence, and formal disruption. Rather than reducing Burroughs to “problematic” status, the chapter insists on reading his paranoia as artistically generative and epistemologically destabilizing – a provocation to critics and ideologues alike.