Since publishers have finally recognised horror as a legitimate art form, the genre has become a necessary acquisition for each publishing house. But the lifting of horror to supposed “literary” heights has had detrimental effects, as publishers aiming for commercial success labelling anything vaguely haunting with the horror moniker. Titles claiming to be literary horror often leave their monsters lurking in the shadows never having the guts to reach out and grab the reader.
I can confirm that this is not the case for Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium. The novel dabbles in folklore and feminist mythmaking to topple the literary canon established by Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, which crescendos into a frightening finale worthy of any scream queen.
Tokarczuk uses rich and textured prose to create terror in the valley. Horror fills the air through the misogynistic and antisemitic vitriol spouted by the patients, thinly veiled as academic thought. Tokarczuk’s characterisation is so perfectly executed that many self-aggrandising conversations between the short-of-breath intellectuals that walk the sanitorium’s grounds are as insufferable for the reader as the men espousing them.
The latest resident to join the resort with magically restorative properties is Wojnicz, a sickly young man who is not like the other residents. He doesn’t share their objectification of women, their need for intellectual grandstanding or agree with their supposed pillars of masculinity. Through Wojnicz’s eyes Tokarczuk offers dysphoric experience of embodiment rarely depicted in literature. The greatest mystery is not what’s lurking in the trees, but Wojnicz’s attachment to femininity and his evolving personhood.
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is out on 26 September (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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