Empuzjon is Olga Tokarczuk’s made-up word in Polish from two Greek words. Symposium – drinkfuelled philosophical debate – and empusa – a female shape-shifter. Here, you can go down a delightful rabbithole to find empusas: Wikipedia took me to Kipling’s poem Tomlinson and Goethe’s play Faust, Teil II. Yet Time News reduces the empusa to a “female bogeyman.” A Polish reviewer for Na kanapie is more interesting, saying that the protagonist of the story is in gender trouble (“uwikłany w płeć,” Karolina Krasuska’s genius translation of Judith Butler).
The Greek makes it easy to translate into lots of European languages, so in English, Tokarczuk’s latest is The Empusium. But the translator is Tokarczuk’s first champion in English, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who also did the thrilling Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. You might have seen the Complicité play of that one, or the Agnieszka Holland film. So the subtitle in English is exciting too. The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story.
If you look at the Polish covers, you can feel that horror. For the book-of-the-film, it’s clear. For Empuzjon, it’s less obvious. But behind that chat circle of just-pre-First-World-War men (?) the mountain slopes up, and the dark forest encroaches down. Peeking out behind them are the Serious Art blue covers of other Fitzcarraldo editions, which send a more measured message. The premise is splendid, as ever, and I loved the sense of gender trouble and of impending doom, but I found all those men pontificating a little tiring. When we got into the woods and up the magic mountain, it got wilder. Maybe Halloween is the right time to read it, after all…
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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