The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: Cody Burke
Release Date: 24 March 2026
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 274 pages
Publisher: Eternal Lotus Publishing
Blurb:
The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is Cody Burke’s unfiltered story of breaking down and breaking free. In this raw and darkly funny memoir, the author battles his ego and demons as he navigates the absurdity of 2020 as a “conspiracy theorist”. His father is dying, but his family is more concerned about social distancing. He attempts to destroy the government narrative to save his family and to save the world… or is he just stroking his own ego? Through psychological spirals, absurd humour, and uncomfortable honesty, the author strives to “question everything”. This memoir pulls you inside to not only the chaos of mental collapse, but to the chaos of evolution. You will find humour in the madness, hope in the heartbreak, and perhaps even you will begin to question everything. Just don’t lose your head…

Review

The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist by Cody Burke is a raw and candid memoir about mental health, family, masculinity, fear, spiritual awakening, political disillusionment, and grief. Beginning with author Burke’s sense that part of him “died” at twenty-seven, the book moves through childhood in the west of Scotland, anxiety, insecurity, marijuana dependence, self-diagnosis, lockdown, conspiracy thinking, his intense bond with his father, and finally the arrival of Tuco (the little Jack Russell) who becomes the emotional and spiritual centre of the memoir.

What makes the book compelling is its voice. Author Burke writes with rough-edged honesty, lacing profanity, humour, wounds, and self-awareness in an often brutally unfiltered way. The prose is not polished in a conventional literary sense, but it has a strong confessional force. The early chapters are especially effective because they reveal the emotional foundation beneath everything that follows. The sections on lockdown and conspiracy thinking are likely to be the book’s most polarising. Still the book is most interesting when read less as a manifesto and more as a portrait of a mind under pressure.

If I had one reservation, it is that the book can sometimes feel overextended. There are moments where the digressions into politics, online rabbit holes, and ideological analysis could have been tightened to give the memoir a sharper emotional through-line. However, the sprawl also feels inseparable from the book’s identity. This is not a neat memoir about healing. It is a messy, searching, sometimes uncomfortable account of a man trying to understand how fear enters the body, love keeps people tethered, and grief can split reality into a before and after.

Overall, The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is a fiercely personal memoir with a great deal of heart beneath its anger and chaos. Its most powerful achievement is its portrait of love: love between father and son, love for a dog who becomes family, and love as the fragile force that keeps a person from disappearing into fear completely.

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