The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

 A young man, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, develops a slight case of tuberculosis and is sent by his gruff father to a sanitarium for treatment.  Mieczyslaw grew up without a mother as his died young and his adult models were his father and his military uncle, both of whom consider him too sensitive and want him to be more masculine.

Set in the early 1900's, there was no real effective treatment for tuberculosis.  Patients were sent to hospitals to rest, take restorative baths and eat good food.  Mieczyslaw is not able to get a room at the main sanatorium and along with some other patients, has taken a room at a nearby inn.  His fellow patients are all older men except for one man around his age.

Mieczyslaw has secrets but he's not about to share them with anyone there.  In fact, everyone seems to have a secret, including the whole town which hides the fact that each November, a young man is taken and killed in the forest, by whom or what no one knows.  The villagers are fairly primitive and full of superstitions which makes finding anything out pretty much impossible.  The village seems a place of death as there are frequent patient deaths to go along with the short lives of the villagers.  When all the secrets are revealed, there will be shock and horror.

Olga Tokarczuk burst onto the American literary scene with her novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  She has also won the International Booker and is one of the most prominent Polish authors now working.  This novel has connections to Thomas Mann's masterpiece, The Magic Mountain, which is set in the same time era and environment but Tokarczuk has chosen to take her story into the horror genre.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.