Thankfully, these fascinating short novels, while they provide plenty of genuine scares, transcend the grisly genre of “ghost stories” or “tales of madness,” partly because their authors self-consciously manipulate staid spine-tingling formulas.
Though separated by a century and a half, these two Swiss novellas detailing the outbreak of uncanny terror in rural communities paint surprisingly similar, and memorable, visions of social repression and religious hypocrisy.