The Vampire of Ropraz

Bitter Lemon Press have introduced British readers to some excellent authors from overseas – for instance, I’d never heard of the late Friedrich Glauser until they printed his highly enjoyable books about Sergeant Studer, and there have been many other examples. So I fell on The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex with great enthusiasm. I did, however, have mixed feelings about the book.

Actually, it’s closer to a novella than a novel – 106 pages of large type, with lots of white space – but that in itself is not a criticism. I often feel daunted by the length of doorstop-sized volumes, given that reading time is all too short. It’s a gruesome tale, apparently based on a true story. There are graphically described mutilations of corpses, starting with an attack on the body of young Rosa Gillieron in a remote Swiss village. Further violations follow, together with brutal attacks on animals. Suspicion shifts around, but finally settles on one young man, who is duly tried. But the story does not finish there.

To say more would be unfair, but this makes it rather difficult to discuss aspects of the story-line that I found unsatisfactory. It’s more a ‘literary’ piece of work than a conventional crime story, but that, of course, is not the problem. Suffice to say that, although Chessex is evidently a talented writer (the translation, by the way, is courtesy of W.Donald Wilson), and the remote community is very well evoked, the surprise ending seems rather out of place and tacked-on. Interesting, but a ‘miss’ for me, rather than a ‘hit’.