What could possibly go wrong, right? 

This is the set-up of Dorothy Bridges’ The Expendable Man, and the answer is, of course, “plenty.” It is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious, and she proves hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then repeatedly showing up again, including at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her. It is not even a big reveal to say that the morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and to have had an abortion. Unsurprisingly, the suspicion of the local police falls on Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her alive. It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence despite the damning circumstances.  

Dorothy Hughes was known as a writer of noir fiction, and The Expendable Man is no exception. From the first page she creates a sense of uneasiness which pervades the entire novel. The dry airless heat of the southwestern desert, the rowdy and vaguely threatening teenagers in their jalopies who buzz about the town of Indio like so many flies, the trackless expanse of territory with the lone hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere, the local police, who seem to have had their humanity burned out by the heat—all of this contributes to the subtle but steadily mounting dread which characterizes so much of the novel.  

The book was written in 1963, when Los Angeles was very much the land of dreams, and Phoenix was still a relatively young and underdeveloped city just beginning to stretch out in the Maricopa Valley; it’s a short distance from the downtown neighborhoods to farms and empty lands where bad things can happen. And when this particular bad thing happens, people want to find the perpetrator. If it could possibly be an outsider, someone educated and from the big city, who drives a big Cadillac—someone “not one of us”—so much the better. Of course it looks too easy, but the community needs someone to blame. They need a sacrifice, and Hugh is just that: convicting him of the crime will spare the police having to look too hard in their own backyard for the culprit. Hugh is literally an expendable man. 

Fortunately, Hugh has his family and his new love interest to support him, and he enlists them in his attempt to solve the crime, because solving the crime is the only way to get him off the hot seat. How this happens is well-plotted and holds the reader’s attention.  

The fact that this is written in 1963 influences the lens through which the novel should be read; that is, with mid-twentieth-century mores and cultural referents in mind. Reaction to the news that the dead girl has had an abortion galvanizes the community—abortion is illegal, and the Arizona of the novel considers it immoral as well. The combination of people’s revulsion at the very fact of the abortion, and the thirst for punishment that accompanies it, magnifies the crime of murder; everyone talks about the heinous nature of what has happened. Also, the Cadillac was at the time a symbol of having “arrived,” and a medical school education was expensive; not all families could afford to pay for one. And golf was, and still is, an expensive indulgence. With touches like these Hughes paints a very specific picture of her protagonist.  

The Expendable Man is, however, so much more than simply a mystery. Hughes’ ability to create the setting and build the uneasiness is superb literary craft. Interestingly, it’s possible that the way she does this has partly to do with her excellent writing and partly to do with popular culture that postdated the novel’s publication—i.e., it may have as much to do with what the reader brings to the novel as (or rather, in addition to) what the author puts in it. Every film that included a hitchhiker story gone bad—and there are any number of them—contributes to the aura of dread in the early pages. And it is hard to read the descriptions of the action in Phoenix without channeling the early parts of Hitchcock’s Psycho. And we all know how that turned out.  

But The Expendable Man is also the novel as social commentary, never directly stated, but always there. The conflict between the middle- or upper-middle-class, cultured, educated, “city slicker” and the locals who think and live very differently—and are looking to hang someone—is riveting.  

There is one big reveal which comes out of left field. It happens relatively early on and changes everything in the way the reader views the story. It’s actually too good, too cleverly imagined, to give away, but watch for it (it’ll be hard to miss) and prepare to have everything you’ve thought about the story suddenly change with the breathless rapidity of a pulled-out rug. It will ratchet up the discomfort and make you re-evaluate the entire story and your reactions to it. 

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.  

The Expendable Man 
Dorothy B. Hughes 
New York, NYRB Classics, 2012 (orig published 1963), 264 pp. 

Web image by Medhum.org

Shortly before the outbreak of The Great War, a young engineering student arrives at a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the mountains of Central Europe. Over the course of his visit there he will share many meals (and drinks) with some of the other patients, a group which will include among others a Catholic conservative and a liberal humanist; there will be long, leisurely after-dinner discussions of varied philosophical topics; temperature charts will be compared; and he will become intrigued by a mysterious woman who is also a patient.  

And no, this is not The Magic Mountain. 

The Empusium is the latest novel from the Nobel- and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. The author subtitles her book “A Health Resort Horror Story,” which is exactly what it is. But it is a horror story which the author has cleverly folded into not just the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel, but the setting and certain elements of the plotline, all of them slightly altered, but recognizable. In fact, recognizing them is part of the fun of this well-plotted, rather Gothic tale. 

As the novel opens Mieczysław Wojnich, a young Pole from Łwów, has arrived at the tuberculosis sanitorium at Gӧbersdorf, in Lower Silesia (currently Poland, formerly Prussia), to be treated for his illness. There is no room at the main building, so he is assigned a room at Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets his fellow (male) patients, who come from various Central European cities and differing viewpoints, but who seem to agree on one thing: the general inferiority of women. Philosophical discussions, which often take place over or after leisurely meals and the consumption of a magic mushroom-laced liqueur called Schwӓrmerei, range widely over several topics (war, language, the nature of reality) but most of the time are intensely misogynistic—what is the purpose of women? Do women have smaller brains than men? Do women’s bodies belong to the State? Have any great discoveries ever been made by women? Should women even be educated at all? (Tokarczuk helpfully includes an appendix to the novel in which she notes that all of the quotes of her characters on this subject are paraphrased from quotes by well-known prominent authors of the past, from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats)  

Things at the sanitorium go badly from the beginning of Wojnich’s stay. He stumbles upon the dead body of a woman laid out on a table, who turns out to be the wife of the guesthouse proprietor, and his companions tell him surreptitiously that she may have been murdered. He hears noises—voices—coming from empty rooms, and cries in the night from outside the guesthouse. An art student who is terminally ill confides that “people die here,” and not just from tuberculosis; every November, apparently, a young man disappears in the surrounding woods, only to have his body turn up ripped to pieces. And what exactly is going on with those woodsmen in the forest, anyway? 

The Empusium works on many levels. It is an homage to The Magic Mountain, but it is definitely not a retelling of The Magic Mountain. The allusions to Mann’s novel are multiple: the pre-World War I setting at a sanitorium in both novels; the fact that both Mieczysław Wojnich and Hans Castorp are engineering students; the philosophies of Settembrini and Naphtha in the Mountain, analogous to the conservative and humanist positions taken in The Empusium; the close childhood relationship between Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mountain) and Wojnich and Anatoly (Empusium), in each case bonding over a pencil. And as in The Magic Mountain, there is a narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall; verb tenses in The Empusium shift repeatedly from third-person singular past tense to first-person plural present. These are not subtle, nor are they intended to be.  

Allusions aside, The Empusium is its own story, and a totally different narrative. It is a horror story, a revenge story, a wryly feminist tale of the supernatural set in a place hopefully of healing but also of chronic illness and the ever-present specter of death. Tokarczuk builds suspense slowly, bit by bit, with increasing tension. Almost from the beginning there is the undeniable sensation that something is very wrong at Gӧbersdorf, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. Wojnich often has the feeling that he is being watched. The story line draws from a tradition of folk horror, and specifically from the notion that bad things can happen to “city people” when they are out in the country, among the “old ways.”  

The Empusium is also more than just a horror story, and an important aspect relates to the misogynistic attitudes mentioned earlier. Tokarczuk takes a position on the nature of male-female relations (perhaps the use of a sanitorium as the setting is meant to suggest that misogyny is an illness infecting educated society). In this book “civilization” seems to be identified with maleness, and maleness is located in the sanitorium and the guesthouse, a controlled environment with its dining rooms and drawing rooms and intellectual conversation—and in the medical world, since this is a facility for medical treatment— and it is here that women are demeaned. The forest, on the other hand, is the home of the Tuntschi, female figures created by laborers out of sticks and moss and other forest detritus. It is a place both beautiful and enchanting—and dangerous. Men venture into the (female) forest, and the forest—in the form of the Schwӓrmerei, which Wojnich describes as redolent of mushrooms, moss, and earth—is brought into the guesthouse; boundaries are porous. Male and female, the guesthouse and the forest each have their secrets…and Wojnich is the last to know. But Wojnich has a secret of his own.   

And the title? A word created by the author. Empusa, in Greek mythology, was a shape-shifting female spirit who seduced young men, drank their blood, then devoured them.  

The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk 
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 
302 pp. 

Web photo by Marek Piwnicki