THE EMPUSIUM : A HEALTH RESORT HORROR STORY by Olga Tokarcsuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) – Riverhead Books, 2024

The Empusium is the story of sick men bad-mouthing women.

The main title is an invented portmanteau linking together two Greek words: symposium (a drink-fuelled philosophical debate) and empusa (a female shape-shifter). 

If, from the book’s subtitle, you are tempted to visualize crazed serial killers or scary monsters , change the thought. There is one mysterious death near the beginning but little that could be conventionally defined as a ‘horror story’. 

In an interview with Literary Hub, Tokarcsuk says “the choice of the horror genre  makes sense because the main theme of this book is essentially a horror story—of patriarchal horror, protracted in historical time, embedded within culture, with all its traditional features, such as rivalry, a black-and-white, binary view of the world, and misogyny.”

I wish I had known this before starting the novel.  It might have made my reading experience less of a slog.

This is not a plot-driven story. It is slow, repetitive and frankly often rather dull. I suppose the prose is intended to replicate the tedium of the prescribed routines in a health resort but I can’t help feeling it could have been edited down and/or spiced up substantially.    

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