The Vampire of Ropraz, By Jacques Chessex, trans W Donald Wilson

Switzerland has the most placid of images. Yet I once lived in a village not 20 miles from Geneva, where a farmer's daughter who had her skull fractured in an accident was deemed a witch by the old women when she returned from hospital with her head shaved.

Such superstitions form the background to Jacques Chessex's story of the creature who haunted a similar Jura village in 1903. The inhabitants, snowed in for months, afflicted by centuries of Calvinist guilt, frequently hang themselves. Potions are rubbed on warts by moonlight, dolls stuck with pins. In such an atmosphere, "a young girl is a lodestar for lunacy".

The lunacy is unleashed when a young woman is buried in the frozen soil and soon afterwards is discovered with fearful mutilations, including the severing of a hand and both breasts. Parts of her flesh have been chewed and regurgitated. Her intestines are hanging out of the coffin. The perpetrator is immediately dubbed "the Vampire of Ropraz". Rumours fly and fear overwhelms the district. Every stranger, every eccentric, is suspected. The horror grows when another ravaged body is found. More atrocities follow, always committed on the corpses of beautiful young women, as if the vampire is watching graveyards.

The horror is heightened by the depths of the Swiss winter: blood-spattered snow, shuttered houses, an atmosphere where the religious intensity of the villagers and their belief in the powers of darkness can flourish. Beyond the village, newspapers fan the flames of rumour and the authorities are driven into action, with every wretched outcast coming under suspicion. Finally, a crippled stable-boy is accused and briefly imprisoned. Released, he is at last caught in the act.

Defended against a lynch mob, he's brought to trial. His case is studied by a doctor who uncovers the story of how a "vampire" is created: a child who had to snatch food from dogs, who was constantly abused and now takes his revenge, a "monster" as product and symptom of human cruelty. This is a superb novella by a winner of the Prix Goncourt, written in a spare prose that renders it a thousand times more effective. Read it with genuine horror.