The Empusium
A Health Resort Horror Story
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3.8 • 46 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER!
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
“A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” –The New York Times Book Review
The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas
September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This haunting historical novel from Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk blends mystery, folklore, and philosophical debate. Suffering from tuberculosis, young Polish engineering student Mieczysław Wojnicz arrives at a mountain health resort in 1913, where he finds himself drawn into nightly debates with fellow patients on topics ranging from politics to the nature of the soul. As a strange local liquor flows, eerie noises emanate from the attic and legends of shape-shifters are told, hinting at darker forces at work in the surrounding wilderness. Combining disquieting suspense with analytical inquiry, Tokarczuk creates an atmosphere thick with ideas and dread. She turns familiar literary tropes on their heads to reflect on the horrors that lie beneath societal norms and the mysteries of the human condition. Against a backdrop of illness, superstition, and impending war, The Empusium is a mesmerizing journey into the shadows of history and the psyche.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk (The Books of Jacob) delivers the disarming tale of a Silesian tuberculosis ward and a series of mysterious deaths in the surrounding countryside. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail engineering student, has been sent to the ward in 1913 to convalesce. While awaiting a room in the main facility, he chats in the guesthouse with a group of fellow patients, whose misogynistic views reflect the period's prevailing attitudes. Tokarczuk places the modern institution against a rural backdrop where locals remain enthralled by ancient folk superstitions, and she explores this dissonance as Wojnicz learns of the witch trials that purportedly drove some women into the wilderness centuries earlier and gave rise to legends of female shape-shifters. Each November, the bodies of mutilated men are recovered from the woods, and hikers stumble upon Tuntschi, female dolls fashioned from natural materials to gratify sex-starved itinerant laborers. At the novel's crisis point, Wojnicz uncovers a chilling connection between the legend and the sanatorium. Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale's uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor.
Customer Reviews
Disappointed
I was so excited when this book was published. Having loved the author's previous book, “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead”, I looked forward to diving into her prose—I love her sentences, the way she uses words, her descriptions . . . and I liked them in this book, too, but the story itself was such a let-down. It had so much potential, but it just fell flat for me. I don’t believe I’ll be reading her again.