The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga TokarczukMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk is a horror novel set in 1913 at a health resort in the Silesian Mountains of Germany, near the border with the Czech Republic. The main character is a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis. He arrives at the end of summer and quickly notices that something is off.
This was a good read. The prose was sometimes challenging (I had to look up a few words in the dictionary) but it was worth the effort. The whole book reads like a fever dream, and I often felt as disoriented and horrified as the main character. I don’t want to say too much and risk giving away spoilers, but I can say that this is unlike any other horror novel I’ve read.
I came across this book on a bookstore table labeled “Weird Books for Weird Folks,” and I was immediately drawn in. The book definitely lived up to its classification. 🙂
I chose to read it after learning more about the author and discovering that she is a Nobel Prize laureate. Tokarczuk writes about deep philosophical issues, and her ideas often bend norms, her wiki mentioned something about the explorations of boundaries between nations and ethnicities, consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and fiction so I figured I’d give it a shot. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I’m planning to check out more of her work. You could say that I’m hooked.
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