Is Death in Spring the scariest novel ever?

The novel Death in Spring (1968?), by the Catalan (Spanish) writer Merce Rodoreda, recently popped up on a list on which people named their choice for most frightening novel (Haunting of Hill House made the list several times, and I would agree); I'm not sure I find Death in Spring frightening, exactly, having reached the 1/3 point, mainly because it is so odd and bizarre in every way that it's almost impossible to identify with the protagonist. This strange novel is in some ways like a frightening dream, a nightmare, and in other like a surrealist vision of life in an alternative universe. The novel begins w/ the narrator - whom we later learn is a boy of about 14 (there is nothing particularly boy-like or distinctive in any way about the narrator's personality or perceptions; as the author is a woman I suspected for the first several brief chapters that the narrator, too, was a woman - ultimately the gender and age don't matter much) who swims across a lake or river, pursued for some reason by a bee, and enters a forest where each tree has an attached ring and medallion (provided by the local blacksmith) and where he watches a man carve out a cross-shaped indentation and then step into the tree. We later learn that the forest is a cemetery of some sort, and the man stepping into the tree is the boy's father. Later in the novel we see more about burial rituals, in which the corpse is filled with cement before implantation into a tree. The village where the boy lives is on a lake, and annually someone has to swim beneath the village to inspect the rocky foundations to ensure that the village won't be washed away in a flood. Those who survive the ordeal emerge with the faces obliterated or entirely erased, and they spend the rest of their lives in isolation from the life of the village, The main activity of the village seems to involve raising horses - who flesh is the main source of diet for the villagers (the slaughterhouse is the largest building in the village) and journeying into a nearby cave the extract some sort of powder that they later mix into a reddish pain that they use to annually paint all of the village buildings. And so it goes - so many strange behaviors and rituals, all of them creepy and vaguely threatening, none making sense in a logical way. As noted, this novel is fascinating - though I'm not sure how long Rodoreda can sustain the mood - and would be more frightening if we had any access to the characters - for ex., if the narrator were recognizable as someone from our world and culture who had wondered into the village or who is being held captive in some manner. As it stands, the novel is strange, even upsetting, but feels far away, like somebody else's nightmare.