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Grace Marks was a convicted double murderer in nineteenth-century Canada. Her case was well known at the time thanks to its sensationally violent and sexual details. The novel Alias Grace (1997) by Margaret Atwood engages in a discussion about the relationship between fact and fiction, scientific objectivity and power. This article analyses the relationship between Atwood’s fictional Grace Marks and Dr Simon Jordan, an American doctor who visits her in prison hoping to find out the truth about Grace and the murders.  Both Grace and Dr Jordan are formed by the existing norms of the time period, norms which govern how men and women of their particular class should act. However, what makes their meetings noteworthy is that Grace Marks possesses knowledge of the norms and expectations and can therefore use them to her advantage, whereas Dr Jordan does not, despite being an educated and professional man. In the end, this leads to Grace’s ability to tell her own story, and Dr Jordan’s failure as a man of science.

The article discusses and examines Larsson’s thus far five crime fiction novels to investigate how the formation of identity are connected to the peripheral North – the “real” North of the globally popular crime fiction subgenre Nordic Noir. Certain key concepts will be used to examine the novels: hyperlocalisation, neo-romanticism, anthropomorphism, borders, and history. This article will argue that in Åsa Larsson’s novels, place and its nature, borders and history are crucial in identity formation, and the place with its nature, climate and animals is an active agent in all the narratives.

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Handling the Undead (2005) has a zombie theme. In this article I argue that the Swedish zombie is very much formed by-or part of-a typically Scandinavian literary context. This entails, among other things, that an implied or explicit discussion about the welfare state helps shape the narrative. Lindqvist describes a contemporary Stockholm where thousands of dead people suddenly wake up. In the novel the zombie is used as a metaphor for and a means to discuss the state of the welfare state. On the other hand, the zombie is also used as a way to handle pain and grief.