Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

The Vanishing, Tim Krabbe (1984)

Steady as spaceships, the cabins full of tourists moved south over the long, broad road.

The Vanishing is a short sharp shock of a novel with a nightmarish ending. Rex Hofman is on holiday with his fiance Saskia, when she simply disappears. He can’t understand it, and years later he’s still restlessly looking for her – then a man called Lemorne calls, claiming to be her abductor. He offers a Faustian pact – you’ll find out what happened to her if you let me you do the same thing to you…

It’s very simple, split basically into four parts – the vanishing, Rex years later, a flashback that shows you Lemorne’s life up till he kidnapped Saskia, then what happens when the two men meet.

This is a gothic tragedy, full of twisted psychology, but it all seems horribly credible, and banal details are built up to make the horror seem real – great, for example, that Saskia disappears at the most mundane location, a petrol station.

And that ending still gives me shivers. Best not leave it in the bedroom – one of those books to keep in the fridge. And if you’re going to watch the film version, seek out the Dutch one from the 80s, not the terrible Hollywood remake.