Paranoid fiction

Similarly, George Orwell's works, while not as exaggerated, confirmed the practice of using dystopian fiction to take a different outlook on highly common themes, including identity and personal desires.

[2] After World War II, absurdists carried this focus one step further by placing these common themes in surreal and fantastic settings, turning what would have been otherwise mundane concepts into distinctive, stand-out ones, thus converting the paranoid fiction genre into a legitimate one.

Generally, however, paranoid fiction avoids explicitly defined themes and concrete motifs in favor of allegories and ambiguous symbolism to emphasize the dreamlike and unreal nature of the characters' world.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four can be viewed as a balance of the two, depicting the Party as crushing free will through a strictly defined language and constant monitoring, but also through psychological torture and the distorting of people's viewpoints on what is true and what is false.

To further increase their "magic realism," works of paranoid fiction often employ common devices and archetypes from other genres, including a detective-solving structure, plot twists, or philosophical themes, to create a surrealistic tone and an atmosphere of fear and dread.

Plots also tend to be fanciful and occasionally futuristic to emphasize their inherent absurdity and imaginativeness, but also maintain some measure of realism to comment on how apparently unrealistic stories can, in fact, be (often frighteningly) closer to real life than one might think at first glance.