The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

The witty new novel from this internationally acclaimed Polish author blends horror, folklore & feminist parable

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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, & bravura.

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Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature & the Man Booker International Prize, for her novel Flights. She has received many other honours, including her country Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike, for both Flights & The Books of Jacob. Her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was also highly praised. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, a children’s book, & two collections of essays. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. Widely regarded as one of the most important writers of her generation, she lives in Poland.