Nature Finds a Way

Some books I read slowly, and some books are slow reads - thickets of language and description that bog a reader down like pine nettles and damp moss, demanding we wade through dense forests of dialogue toward unclear destinations. This was my experience with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's "The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story," which unfolds as slowly and uncertainly as the recoveries sought by its tuberculotic patients.

Set in 1913 Görbersdorf (now Sokołowsko, Poland), a center for health cures in Silesia's mountainous southern edge known during the period for its sanitoriums, the story follows Mieczysław Wojnicz, a 24-year-old Polish engineering student sent from Lwów by his father for treatment. He arrives at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, run by Herr Opitz and inhabited by an eclectic cast: teacher Longis Lukas, philologist-writer August August, theosophist Walter Frommer, and art student Thilo von Hahn, along with Dr. Semperweiss, assistant Raimund, and various passing figures. They spend their days in health treatments, mushroom gathering, and dissecting their crumbling world.

Women occupy the margins—the short-lived Frau Opitz, Fraus Weber and Brccht, the lightly sketched Frau Large Hat, and others invoked occasionally. This gender separation proves central; much of the discourse filling days and pages focuses on women's supposed nature, faults, and intellectual inferiority to men, at least in the gentlemen's collective view. Nightly sessions fueled by Schwärmerei, a mind-bending local liqueur, see them lobbing quotations from Ovid, Plato, and Aristophanes in endless attempts to explain existence, and the inherent superiority of their gender, to one another.

This pre-podcast era health spa man-cation's collective bonding breaks with Frau Opitz's death - sudden yet oddly matter-of-fact. While her loss unsettles Herr Opitz and some guests, particularly our narrator Wojnicz, it's his conversations with the weakening Thilo and a cemetery visit that reveal a pattern of November deaths, setting up our mystery.

The mystery remains mostly subdued as chapters cycle through daily wanderings and nightly mansplaining sessions. Like playing through an open-world game, we find faint clues while mostly encountering characters who monologue backstory without advancing the plot. Something feels wrong about this setting—something vaguely unsettling about the environment and characters' emotional depths, about the nightly sounds Wojnicz hears beneath his covers—yet any gothic mood hangs thinly for long stretches. When another character finally points out something rotten in Lower Silesia around page 220, I questioned my investment in reaching that point.

Yes, the landscape broods dark and deep, and abnormal things may lurk, but the story struggles to make us care. What should be psychological tension ebbs too frequently, even for readers patient with delayed payoff. The experience mirrors M. John Harrison's "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again," another well-crafted but glacially paced work of gothic fiction where unsettling elements accumulate so gradually that one questions whether anything truly wyrd will emerge. For me, the homage to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" takes up a lot of oxygen, leaving less room for the underlying story to breathe.

The final hundred pages accelerate into folk-horror territory, like finding a tuntschi-haunted novella at this turducken's center, speeding us toward a triple surprise ending that more attentive readers might anticipate. The glancing mentions of figurines left in the woods, the mysterious attic above Wojnicz's room, have indeed been signposts, as has the occasional shift in narration. Yet perhaps I read with the wrong eyes—the real horror may lie not in Görbersdorf's mysterious deaths, but in the imbalanced world they attempt to correct, one which the feminine, so excluded and shunned from the day-to-day world of salons and grand philosophies, exerts its powers. In the end, Nature, our nature, and particularly Wojnicz's nature, finds their way.