Happy, you really are a first-class gloomy bugger," JC said affectionately. "You could gloom for the Olympics, and still take a Bronze in existential paranoia."

Everyone has to be good at something," said Happy smiling in spite of himself.

No INSECURITY makes us sociopathic; too much makes us paranoid; but a little keeps us humble and introspective-a good thing...

Shaver’s worldview was a deeply paranoid one in which pretty much everything of importance was traced back to evil deros and sinister machines in the hollow earth. He did not believe in God, an afterlife, a spiritual world, or paranormal powers: all such htings were the purely physical and totally illusory effects of the ray machines of the deros. We have all been duped, and we are constantly being zapped in our dreams, diseases, and disasters. “The unseen world beneath our feet, malignant and horrible, is complete in its mastery of Earth,” he declared with not a doubt or qualification in sight. So, too, there is no such thing as astral travel or spirits. The spirits seen in séances are in fact projections of the machines controlled again by entirely physical creatures seething and scheming below us. Like other hollow earthers before him, Richard Shaver was what Palmer called “an extreme materialist.” He knew nothing of the psychology of projection, and he seemed completely incapable of thinking symbolically or metaphorically, which I take as a fairly clear symptom of whatever psychological condition he suffered.

Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.

Can I say something out loud? Is anybody listening?"
"Everybody. Nobody. Does it matter?

There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom.

("Out Of The Deep")