Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Empusium > Status Update

11. White ribbons, dark night
Despite Frommer’s warning, I don’t believe for a moment that Wojnicz needs to fear the Empusae.

10. The Culmination of Geometry

Things are getting more and more ominous. After talking with Thilo about how Abraham did kill his son and the yearly sacrifice of a man in Görbersdorf, here’s Herr August stooping around at night and a painting of another animal (a hare, this time) hanging upside down with blood dripping into a bowl.

9. The Tuntschi

8. A Symphony of Coughing

He is breathing calmly as waves of fragrance meet in his nose — an herb to deter clothed moths, some very cheap perfume, dust, starch, and the indeterminate odor that human beings leave behind after they die.

Just in case you had forgotten the non-human narrator(s) are still very much around, observing minutely…

Don’t get attached to him, my boy. He hasn’t much time left.

Given Wojnicz got the same advice about the ducks that Jóseph brought home in his youth and ended up hanging upside down bleeding out from their necks, this sounds even more ominous than it would normally. After all it’s getting near to November and someone is bound to perish in a Health Resort Horror Story…

Even the toughest men melt like jelly when they’re subjected to women’s tricks. And that includes women acting from beyond the grave.

7. Woe, woe is me!

Gloom and gold. (On the Saint Emerentia icon) (p124)

To be a man means learning to ignite whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery.