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These three authors share a common starting point: Patricia Highsmith, William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick all began their careers writing mass market genre fiction in pre-Stonewall, pre-civil rights, Cold War 1950s America. Absorbing the stylistic codes of their respective marketplaces of suspense writing and lesbian romance, "drug fiend" confessional, and science fiction, each writer's conformist apprenticeship in pulp resurfaces in increasingly nightmarish forms in the violent and paranoid scenarios that dominate their mature work. Reading broadly in each author's short fiction, novels, and prose, we will sequentially examine Burroughs' "cut-up" techniques and "routines", Highsmith's free indirect discourse gone wrong, and Dick's disorienting temporal experiments as inflamed allergic reactions to generic codes. We will also examine the cinematic afterlives of these authors by looking at key scenes from three adaptations of their work: Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006).