The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

By Olga Tokarczuk   
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones   

“A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” –The New York Times Book Review

"An odd, fascinating book—a blackly serious joke—from an author of great daring and intelligence…. What stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief. This is the thread that runs through all of Ms. Tokarczuk’s wildly various books.”—Wall Street Journal

“Historical fiction threaded through with a playful kind of literary horror, The Empusium . . . is in part a wry response to Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain, blending high philosophy with dark comedy, strange folklore, and hallucinogenic liquors.”—Goodreads, “Most Anticipated Boos of the Fall”

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.

Hardcover
320 pages
Riverhead Books, 2024
6 x 9 inches
ISBN 9780593712948
Historical Fiction