ABSTRACT
This chapter will look at the fusion of two narrative styles: social realism and the popular paranormal. I shall perform a reading of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 thriller Let the Right One In alongside the young adult novel The Circle by Sara Elfgren and Mats Strandberg (2011), two contemporary Scandinavian novels that take as their central concern a critique of the enduring myths of the welfare state. The particular combination of witchcraft and psi abilities in The Circle and vampire lore in Let the Right One In – mixed with a distinctly realist tradition – makes these texts stand out as examples of an emerging new style of the popular paranormal. This chapter will posit that these texts engage in complex ways with contemporary social realities. I shall discuss the style of ‘paranormal social realism’ by situating these recent novels in relation to current critical debates on the paranormal in popular culture, and the strong Scandinavian tradition of proletarian literature. Paranormal social realism is not a publishing category or a subgenre but a stylistic development that draws on already existing ways of thinking about fictional writing.
