Novel: Running Dog

Overview
Running Dog is a lean, fast-moving novel that stitches together elements of thriller, satire, and cultural diagnosis. It follows the pursuit of a sensational object, a rumored private film of Hitler, that functions less as a historical artifact than as a mirror for a society obsessed with images, rumor, and profit. The story moves through the underworld of collectors and dealers, landing in the nervous atmosphere of political paranoia and tabloid opportunism.

Plot
A down-market magazine named Running Dog dispatches a reporter to verify a rumor: a lurid, intimate film of Hitler has surfaced and might be circulating among private collectors. The reporter's assignment leads into a web of intermediaries, ex-convicts, right-wing activists, and other players who traffic in the relics and spectacles of violent history. Each encounter amplifies the mystery rather than resolving it; the search becomes less about confirming a document's existence than about tracking the propulsion of rumor and desire.
As the investigation unfolds, the pursuit shifts from pure curiosity to an obsessive hunt that draws in opportunists with competing motives, profit, fame, ideological conviction. The alleged film functions as a catalyst, bringing together unlikely characters and exposing how political anxieties and media dynamics feed one another. The narrative propels readers through episodes of reportage, sting operations, and moral unease, culminating in an ambiguous resolution that leaves the film's reality and its cultural consequences uncertain.

Characters
The central figure is the tabloid reporter whose professional aim, scoops and circulation, collides with the ethical and existential stakes of the hunt. Surrounding the reporter are a parade of figures who occupy liminal roles: collectors who fetishize objects of atrocity, right-wing militants who infuse the rumor with political meaning, and media insiders who commodify scandal. None of the characters are rendered as simple villains or heroes; they are portrayed as symptomatic of a larger cultural appetite for sensational material.
These personalities are sketched with a terse, economical hand; their motives often feel transactional rather than deeply explored, which reinforces the novel's interest in systems of exchange and spectacle more than in interior psychology.

Themes
Running Dog interrogates how modern culture processes and profits from images of catastrophe. The rumored film acts as a symbol of the way traumatic history is converted into collectible commodity and circulating myth. The novel examines media sensationalism and the tabloid appetite for scandal, arguing that the demand for shocking images reshapes political life and public memory.
Political paranoia and conspiracy also thread through the book, showing how uncertainty and suspicion become marketable currencies. DeLillo probes the collapse of distinctions between news, entertainment, and commerce, and he suggests that the mechanisms that distribute images, dealers, magazines, rumor networks, become as consequential as the images themselves.

Style and Tone
The prose is spare, dryly ironic, and driven by a restless momentum that mirrors the chase at the center of the story. Satire and thriller conventions coexist; comic bleakness and procedural detail feed into one another. DeLillo's language often feels detached, observing the mechanics of media and power with clinical clarity while allowing absurdity and menace to accumulate around the characters.
Pacing is brisk, with scenes composed of short, pointed exchanges and documentary-like interludes that mimic tabloid reportage. That formal coolness intensifies the unsettling idea that obsession and commodification can be rendered almost mundane.

Conclusion
Running Dog offers a compact, penetrating critique of late-20th-century media culture, exploring how images of violence are bought, sold, and mythologized. The novel's unsettling ambiguity, about both the film's existence and the moral landscape it exposes, turns the pursuit itself into the principal subject. As a satire of paranoia and a study of spectacle, the book anticipates many contemporary anxieties about media, authenticity, and the political economy of images.