This study addresses the following question through a new, interdisciplinary approach to fantastic fiction that draws connections between urgent contemporary issues, critical theory, and contemporary fantastic novels written in French: How might the supernatural, which by definition departs from the real, paradoxically shed light on some of the most pressing, real concerns faced by contemporary societies? In response, it explores the fantastic modalities used by four French authors – Marie Darrieussecq, Milan Kundera, Marie NDiaye, and Antoine Volodine – to grant an innovative understanding of certain pressing issues: the environmental crisis, totalitarianism, racism, and community formation. It argues that by blurring boundaries and promoting ambiguity over rational understanding, our four authors at once complicate conceptual categories, including binaries such as human/nonhuman, black/white, French/foreign, partisan/dissident, inclusion/exclusion, and individual/community, as well as ethical distinctions between what is just and unjust, and shift the focus to the experiential and affective dimensions of these issues.Moreover, this study recognizes and responds to the rift dividing current French scholarship on the literary fantastic. Traditionally, the fantastic was considered by Tzvetan Todorov to be a nineteenth-century genre that provokes intellectual hesitation in the reader, who is unable to decide between a rational and a supernatural explanation of events. Charles Grivel and Denis Mellier recently reoriented the critical landscape by focusing on visualization in works stretching across the past two centuries that overtly represent supernatural events. This project nuances this hermeneutical gap by considering novels that display a strong intellectual dimension in their exploration of pressing contemporary concerns, yet do so through directly-represented fantastic events. It argues that in the novels discussed here, the fantastic is used, not to represent events that are themselves uncertain, but to destabilize conceptual categories in a way that encourages us to think with and feel with those that are excluded.