The Empusium shares several literary qualities with
Thomas Mann's 1924 novel
The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk acknowledges that
The Empusium is "a conscious, carefully thought-out reference" to
The Magic Mountain. In a 2022 interview, Tokarczuk mentioned that she rereads Mann's novel every few years: "It's interesting to see a book change with time, and that is one that must be read differently with age." 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". whereas the mysterious "we" narration is
first-person plural, and seemingly comes from the ghostly entities. Olga Tokarczuk defines
The Empusium as a "
horror story of the
patriarchate" that deals with themes such as a black-and-white
gender binary view of the world and
misogyny that are historically embedded in culture. 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. Empusa is mentioned in a scene from
Aristophanes's play
The Frogs, which one of Tokarczuk's characters recites for the others. The term "empusium" is not fully explained within the book and only explored more deeply in its final pages.'' ==Publication==