Not being a massive fan of really frightening thrillers I discovered you don`t need to read them in order to scare the pants off yourself: try The Revenge of Power by Moises Naim and see how well you sleep for a day or two after you`ve finished it.
A relatively hefty looking tome, it is not a difficult read despite being a detailed analysis of, as the subtitle says, "How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century". In fact it is an extraordinary description of the way in which "populism, polarization and `post-truth` politics" (Naim`s 3Ps) have resulted in a marked increase in authoritarian and autocratic regimes around the world.
For such dry sounding subject matter it is in fact a dramatic story of corruption, collusion, manipulation, criminality, dark social networks and carefully calculated disinformation which weaken, even destroys, the individual`s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction or perhaps more significantly their desire to do so.
And if anyone`s inclined to shrug and say they don`t "do" politics it might be worth reading just to understand how politics is "doing" them.
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