Kafkaesque

1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.

2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger.

Franz Kafka was a German-Jewish author who is credited for being instrumental in the development of existentialisim. His most well known novel is "The Trial" a satire of bureaucracy.

2. Of or pertaining to Franz Kafka or his writings. This is only a secondary definition as the term Kafkaesque refers more to the quality of his writings, and the emotions they inspire, than to the man himself. (Emphatically not the primary definition.)

1. Paranoid, although not in a schizophrenic sense of false persecution, but rather in a more-subtle-than-Orwell acknowledgement that everybody might just really be out to get you sense. This might be in the literally-accessable terms of The Trial (a realist tale in which a man is sentenced for a crime of which he is never formally accused) or the more metaphoric terms of The Metamorphosis (in which a man is transformed into a giant insect, and reviled for personal qualities for which he is not to blame).