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CLASS TRIP By Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, Metropolitan Books, 162 pages, Fiction. emmanuel Carrère's macabre little novella, "Class Trip," is a meticulously nuanced stunt. At the end of it, I had the same feeling I had at the conclusion of the Dutch film "The Vanishing." There was no denying the talent involved, but what was the point? Nicolas, Carrère's protagonist, is a sheltered, solitary child sent off on a weeklong school ski trip. He's not very popular to begin with, and when his father forgets to drop Nicolas' bag off with him, he has to depend on the mercy of his classmates for necessities. Nicolas enters into a tenuous alliance with Hodkann, the oldest boy in the class, whose approval is granted or withdrawn seemingly on whim alone. He also finds a champion and protector in Patrick, one of the resort's ski instructors. Long before a local child disappears and then turns up dead, Carrère establishes the sort of psychologically queasy atmosphere where you expect a humiliation around every corner. I don't know that I've ever encountered such a complete understanding of the morbid, self-pitying fantasies outcast children are prone to. Carrère gets us right inside Nicolas' little head, whirring with daydreams, and nails the stratagems these kids develop to make themselves the object of sympathetic, indulgent attention. "(Hodkann) sat down familiarly on the edge of the bed, next to Nicolas, saying 'You've got a lead?' The wall of hostility had crumbled in an instant. Nicolas wasn't afraid anymore; on the contrary, he felt united with Hodkann in that trusting, whispering complicity he'd often dreamed about ... at night, by the gleam of a flashlight, while everyone else was asleep, they were trying to solve a mystery." Carrère can certainly raise buried memories of your own whiny childishness. But when a writer ends up with the sort of O. Henry-meets-Grand Guignol twist that closes "Class Trip," nothing that's gone before can resonate; it's all a set-up for cheap irony. And there's something particularly cheerless about writers (or filmmakers) who think that horror tales are violated by comedy. (Don't they realize how close the calamities of horror are to the calamities of farce?) The jacket of "Class Trip," which was a bestseller in France, has a quote that refers to Stephen King's famous remark about being a salami writer and gushes that Carrère writes caviar. Maybe. But you can't make a meal out of the droppings of small fry. Feb. 12, 1997 -- Charles Taylor Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html