TAKE A LONELY FARM, isolated in an underpopulated countryside, the neighbours few and far between. And then suddenly, brutally, eliminate all its inhabitants: father, mother, daughter, grandchildren and maid. An unexplained, inexplicable savage act of murder.

This remarkable, sparse, chilling novella by the first-time German author Andrea Maria Schenkel takes an incident, reported to be true, and examines it forensically. Not, as so many modern so-called detective stories do, by scientifically investigating the minutiae of the physical evidence, but as a journalist might, talking to the witnesses.

Or rather the non-witnesses, the people who say that they know nothing, but in reality know everything: the psychology, the sordid family secrets, the warped mesh of local interpersonal relationships. These are people who, like the three wise monkey hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, yet deep down, know all about it.

Both atmosphere and the roundabout manner of the telling, spiralling in from an almost documentary approach to the psychological and the hidden, almost chillingly mundane horror make this a curiously original literary European equivalent of The Blair Witch Project.

In the original German, Murder Farm was entitled simply Tannöd, the name of the hamlet where the atrocity occurs. The name suggests pine forests and malignancy, in a way that of necessity can be rendered in English only by the descriptions in the text.

Yet these do their job, along with the oblique references to the farm's isolation. People sense there is something wrong because “the whole family didn't turn up at church on Sunday”: the focal point for a small, strung-out community.

This is a story strongly situated not just geographically but chronologically: in Germany of the mid-1950s, when “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” was the great unasked question.

And yet Murder Farm is not some hackneyed tale of Nazis or neo-Nazis, but a story about a society in which a certain sickness has been allowed to linger, and fester. Nor is it necessarily German. It is easy to imagine a similar scenario unfolding in some backwater of Appalachian America: a closeted corner of the world where inbreeding is the acknowledged but unspoken norm.

It is hard to read this book without coming under the sinister shadow of the Austrian family incarcerated in the cellar for half a lifetime. As this book emphasises, this is a world in which grace, and its absence, depend on the humanity of human beings.

Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel
Quercus, £9.99; 192pp
Buy the book

Andrea Maria Schenkel and Anthea Bell apppear at the Goethe-Institut, London SW7, on June 3 at 7pm. Admission is free.

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