Colin Dickey is a writer, speaker, and professor who has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories from all over the country. He’s the author of several books, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained. A regular contributor to The New Republic and Lapham’s Quarterly, he is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. His next book, about secret societies in the United States, will be published in 2023 by Viking Press.

Not so long ago, conspiracy theorists were relegated to the fringe. Considered oddballs in tinfoil hats, they raged to one another about who shot JFK and whether an astronaut really walked on the moon. In recent years, everything has shifted. From stolen-election claims and vaccine disinformation to QAnon, conspiracies are no longer whispered. They've moved awfully close to the front and center.

In Land of Delusion, cultural historian Colin Dickey, acclaimed author of The Unidentified and Ghostland, introduces readers to two particularly bizarre theories gaining traction in the United States and Russia. They seem far-fetched, but as the American right wing retreats further into its political bunker and war rages in Ukraine, it’s clear that behind the absurdity lurk radical ideas that are becoming alarmingly commonplace.

In this piece, Dickey digs into the beliefs that may offer a road map to where we are headed while highlighting the lunacy that is already here. Tartaria is a great empire that spread across the globe from Russia, only to be destroyed by evil schemers who erased it from the history books. The New Chronologists claim that history began only eight hundred years ago and that the world was originally dominated by blond, blue-eyed Slavs.

Entertaining yet grimly serious, Land of Delusion takes readers inside the warped logic of conspiracy theorists and connects the dots between crazy ideas and real-time events. Weird is one thing — weird and dangerous demands our full attention.

Available November 16 as both an ebook and audiobook narrated by Edoardo Ballerini.