The term paranoid fiction was first coined to label sensationalistic and off-beat stories as bizarre and thus outside the realm of literary fiction. Starting after World War I, however, modernists began exploring the stranger themes of life in art, in response to [citation needed] the themes of death being effectively mechanized and made impossible to toy with by the war's graphic depictions. As a result, modernist literature tended to explore the meaning and construction of reality, shifting away from the progressive, cause-and-effect structure of realist fiction towards a more complex and disjointed depiction of reality.[2]