Jacques Chessex: The Vampire of Ropraz

I bet you've come across one of those ultimate book lists - books sorted by their importance, chronology, success and so on. I've seen a book list of vampire books no one reads. That sounded bizarre enough (how can the author of the article know about the books if they are not read?) to catch my attention so ever since then I've been on the lookout for the books on that list. It's really difficult to obtain them since they are no longer in print but I'm positive I'll get them all and find out why no one reads them.

So I think I've figured out why no one reads The Vampire of Ropraz. Its length isn't at fault because it reaches one hundred pages so you are done with it in no time, therefore why not read it, right? I think it is due to its lack of the vampires we are used to nowadays. This fake Gothic story covers events which supposedly happened more than one hundred years ago and the events are similar to what was actually happening at that time - that is pointing at mentally ill and saying they were vampires. This story uses the word vampire as our ancestors used it - they just didn't know they weren't dealing with what we now call vampires but rather with odd individuals. And I thing that's a major turnoff for many readers.
The other thing can be the language. I'm not sure how much was lost in translation, but I guess what was supposed to be a little poetic (the sentence structures are a bit different) somehow doesn't work in English.

The story has very interesting traits to it (it is always a thrill if you add a lunatic in the mix) but the events go unexplained, the facts are stated as if by a robot with almost no sense for details. So it wasn't altogether a bad book considering it was probably an attempt at early vampire Gothic works (Carmilla isn't that detailed either if I remember correctly) but somehow it's too swift, too dull and when you start enjoying it it's suddenly over.

GENRE: attempt at Gothic

FANGS OUT: it looks real and believable
FANGS RETRACTING:  didn't reach its potential
TOTAL SCORE: