World Books Review: Two Volumes of Swiss Horror

Half of Switzerland is Hell, but the other half is Paradise. – Voltaire

The Vampire of Ropraz, by Jacques Chessex. Translated from the French by W. Donald Wilson. 106 pages, Bitter Lemon Press.

The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf. Translated by H. M. Waidson. Oneworld Classics.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Though separated by a century and a half, these two Swiss novellas detailing uncanny terror in rural communities suggest that the percentage of the demonic in Switzerland has grown considerably since Voltaire made his observation about the equality of good and evil.

The spanking new “The Vampire of Ropraz” asserts that, when faced with irrational violence, the forces of ignorance and fear predominate. The classic “The Black Spider” (which was first published in 1842; this is a reprint of the 1958 English edition) revolves around a reneged deal with the Devil, who wants, but doesn’t get, an unbaptized child as payment for his services. The betrayal unleashes the title monster, who can be stopped by goodness, if it is free of moral corruption and hypocrisy. The latter turns out to be a tall order. But at least there’s some Paradise around to counterbalance Gotthelf’s Hell.

Interestingly, both of these books root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children. Gotthelf appears to wish for a God “Who would avenge Himself terribly for all the injustice that is done to poor children who cannot defend themselves.” In a strange way, the Devil is doing the Lord’s work by punishing the sadists among the low- and upper classes.

The suspected “vampire” in Chessex’s volume, which is based on a true story, was treated so horribly as a child he is barely human. Among the few who offer him kindness is a psychologist who sees the man as “more a victim of rural poverty than the tormentor of a society unwilling to allow him a chance in life.”

The differences between these two tales of sin, besides their metaphysics, turn on issues of scale and writing style. Chessex, who won the Prix Goncourt for his 1974 novel “The Ogre,” approaches this tale of enigmatic violence in a distinctly modern way. His prose style is clinical and tersely poetic. The plot is primal: in a turn-of-the century village high in the Swiss mountains the graves of three young women are violated: their bodies have been dug up and left heinously mutilated in the snow. (Be warned: the damage to the corpses is exactingly detailed.)

The population demands that the “vampire,” as the creature is called in the press, be caught and destroyed. Preachers decry the general immorality; garlic and crucifixes are worn by many for protection, all to ward off “the obsession with sexual, expiatory violation engrafted in the flesh. The ancient guilt of bodies punished, offered to the Devil.”

A stable boy named Charles Fevez is arrested and, despite scarce evidence, quickly convicted. After undergoing psychiatric observation he vanishes: years later Fevez turns up, according to Chessex, fighting in World War I. The author’s brusquely controlled fury blames religion, isolation, and sexual repression for the provincial village’s ungodly misery: “In this remote countryside a young girl is a lodestar for lunacy. For incest and brooding in unwed gloom on flesh for ever desired and for ever forbidden.” Anchored in frustration, it’s no wonder the forces of sanity are impotent.

The narrative’s serenely hands-off approach can be frustrating at times: readers are kept a safe distance from the goings-on in Fevez’s mind. But “The Vampire of Ropraz” proffers a lyrically compacted image of collective psychopathology, a bitterly ironic critique of frightened people who know that “the monster will have the last word in this vale of bitter tears and richly deserved darkness that God has granted us.”

Edward Gorey's cover drawing for a 1950s edition of "The Black Spider"

A Swiss pastor, Gotthelf serves up a far more complex yarn of God’s mysterious grace, a ferocious fairy tale that offers scenes of gore worthy of a Hollywood horror film. A tyrannical landowner demands the exhausted villagers (who just built him a castle) do a herculean job of tree planting. The Devil offers to do the task, if he gets an unbaptized child in payment. He is rebuffed at first, but then a woman (from another country; there’s a strain of xenophobia in the story) takes up the offer. Once the Devil has done his part he waits for the first unchristened child, only to have the kid baptized in record time.

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Thus a rein of terror of plague-like apocalyptic dimensions begins, with thousands of lethal black spiders spreading across the countryside, killing livestock, men, women, and children. The first batch of homicidal bugs pop out of the cheek of the woman who made the agreement:

Then Christine felt as if her face was bursting open, as if burning coals were being born, coming to life and crawling away over her face, over all her limbs as if her whole face was coming to life and crawling away red-hot over all her body. In the pale light from the lightning she now saw black little spiders, long-legged, poisonous and innumerable, running over her limbs and out into the night …

Amazing stuff, and the giant black spider that perches on people’s heads is yet to come! (The macabre images of creepy crawlies pouring out of a person’s cheek probably inspired similar scenes in “The Believers,” John Schlesinger’s 1997 film about voodoo.) Gotthelf tries to defuse the power of his imagination by nesting these nightmares in a reassuring framing tale. But the oh-so-idyllic description of the christening of a child suggests the sugar-glazed hysteria of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Things are too desperately perfect; the fear of unspeakable evil redux transforms ceremony into fetish.

The translation by H. M. Waidson creaks and lumbers when it should explode—the book could probably use a fresher English version, though I haven’t read Mary Hottinger’s competing translation.

Thomas Mann may have gone overboard by admiring “The Black Spider” “like almost no other piece of world literature” – but it’s a sensational yarn of sin and salvation that still delivers a wonderfully cankered sting.