Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

Don DeLillo is not considered a regionalist writer in the American literary tradition, yet this chapter explores a primary geographical region in which his novels are often set, the Southwest, with emphasis on both urban and desert landscapes. DeLillo's early novel Running Dog and his later work Point Omega are the chapter's main examples. While DeLillo is not a regionalist in any conventional sense, the chapter explains how DeLillo's fiction disrupts literary conventions of time and space in his depiction of the American Southwest, thereby asking readers to consider a reading of DeLillo in which postmodern literary experimentalism combines with a punk rock aesthetic rooted in graffiti and political art (hence the chapter's title, which borrows a a lyric from the Misfits, a band named after a famous mid-century Western film).

DeLillo has often been portrayed as a “reclusive author.” Even though this characterization of the man himself is not quite accurate, DeLillo’s work is rife with images of artists as solitary geniuses who eschew the spotlight. On a structural level, that image is manifested as well in how DeLillo himself rejects the postmodernist trend toward self-reflexivity and metafictional authorial intrusions. Instead, DeLillo’s work evinces the artistry of a distant but still controlling godlike author-figure, whom his characters can sense but not see.