The young Mieczysław Wojnicz, a hydraulic engineering student from Lwów, arrives at the sanatorium on a cold September night to treat his lungs with the purity of the mountain air and a healthy lifestyle.

The Empusium shares several literary qualities with Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain,[1] as well as reprising several exact plot elements: a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis; a time setting of 1913 which precedes World War I; and a protagonist who is a young engineer.

[4] The Wall Street Journal assessed Tokarczuk's novel as an "homage and part rejoinder" to Mann's original work and one which glides from "playful pastiche to feminist polemic".

[6] Contrasting its qualities from that of Mann's novel, the New York Journal of Books wrote that The Empusium "falls into the ambiguous category of literary suspense and is woven through with magical realism, disconcerting point-of-view switches involving unexplained "we" observers, and verb-tense changes from past to present".

[8] The novel's title (Empuzjon in Polish) is a neologism by Tokarczuk derived from the name for a shapeshifting female demon called Empusa who was thought, in Greek mythology, to prey upon men.

"[6] In his review for The Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks called it an "absorbing if often mystifying reading, but what stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief.