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This'll Make Things a Little Easier
Attila Veres' debut collection, The Black Maybe, was hailed as one of the best horror debuts in years and was named Rue Morgue's best collection of 2022 as well as being a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Critics likened it to debut collections by writers like Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti in terms of its sheer originality of style and vision. Now Veres is back with a follow-up collection of unforgettable cosmic horror.
In the opening story, 'a pit full of teeth', an aspiring Hungarian horror writer gets the exciting news that one of his stories will be translated into the obscure language of a reclusive tribe that almost no one knows anything about. But when his copy of the translation arrives, he discovers that it doesn't match what he wrote: instead, the text contains a much more horrific narrative that seems to be playing out in reality. In 'The Designated Contact Individual', a traveling representative for a soft drink company finds his sales territory expanding when he is sent to an alternate reality where they have their own nightmarish use for his cola. 'Damage d10+7' tells of a group of gamers who commit a terrible outrage in the fantasy world of their game and which has a deadly ripple effect in their real lives. The narrator in 'The Summer I Chose to Die' has decided that life is no longer worth living, but his worldview is shaken up when a murderous army of fish-people begins to rise from the oceans. And in the title story, money literally does grow on trees when the Hungarian government tries to alleviate poverty by supplying families with a strange new plant species, but their newfound financial gain will come at a terrible cost.
Like the stories in his first collection, the tales in This'll Make Things a Little Easier are blood-chillingly frightening, often darkly humorous, and always dazzlingly brilliant. Readers who were left wanting more when they finished reading The Black Maybe won't want to miss this new volume.
In the opening story, 'a pit full of teeth', an aspiring Hungarian horror writer gets the exciting news that one of his stories will be translated into the obscure language of a reclusive tribe that almost no one knows anything about. But when his copy of the translation arrives, he discovers that it doesn't match what he wrote: instead, the text contains a much more horrific narrative that seems to be playing out in reality. In 'The Designated Contact Individual', a traveling representative for a soft drink company finds his sales territory expanding when he is sent to an alternate reality where they have their own nightmarish use for his cola. 'Damage d10+7' tells of a group of gamers who commit a terrible outrage in the fantasy world of their game and which has a deadly ripple effect in their real lives. The narrator in 'The Summer I Chose to Die' has decided that life is no longer worth living, but his worldview is shaken up when a murderous army of fish-people begins to rise from the oceans. And in the title story, money literally does grow on trees when the Hungarian government tries to alleviate poverty by supplying families with a strange new plant species, but their newfound financial gain will come at a terrible cost.
Like the stories in his first collection, the tales in This'll Make Things a Little Easier are blood-chillingly frightening, often darkly humorous, and always dazzlingly brilliant. Readers who were left wanting more when they finished reading The Black Maybe won't want to miss this new volume.
- GenresHorror
220 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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July 31, 2025I'm stoked.
January 20, 2026
This is simply one of the greatest modern single author story collections I’ve read. Themes running throughout are the cruelty of capitalism and modern politics, the nature of reality, and resignation in the face of insurmountable forces, from politicians and corporate executives to eldritch gods beyond our comprehension. All written in a clear and unpretentious way. Even better than his previous collection as it’s more cohesive and while the stories are widely varied, the themes unify them symbolically and some aspects of the stories are directly tied to others. I expect this to be a keystone work of modern horror. I look forward to much more from this author.
February 4, 2026
Excellent alienated ironic post-Communist, post-capitalist transition Mitteleuropean Lovecraft, and a bit more unified than his first collection. (Hungarianness as always already cosmic horror: "insignificance and lack of control have always been a fact of life for me....It's good to know every decision I made or ever will make is essentially meaningless. It takes the pressure off. But I live in Hungary, so that's no big surprise.") Tropes and ideas and images repeat, with at least three stories that are keepers. The opener feels like an in-joke from the start about Hungarian's linguistic oddness, but also a surprisingly sincere reflection on writerly marginalization and dreams; I pretty much never tire of metafictional plots involving some sort of unspeakable (I suppose literally in this case) text, this with pomo twist about a barely-known tribal language that shapes reality.
How about cosmic horror as droll capitalist satire? (And also, given where things stand these days, essentially realist fiction.) The corporate-drone one, where a protagonist all too willing to sell his soul to the company store (best line: "every time upper management praised my work, I told them I was doing so well because I genuinely loved Broc Cola. I felt an emotional swelling inside when I said it, because I meant every word, even though management always thought I was being sarcastic") gets the opportunity of a lifetime on a sales trip to another dimension, ruled by a corporation devoted to worshipping a desert-dwelling Lovecraftian entity, is just fabulous. Feels like an exemplary satire of the imposition of casino capitalism on 1990s Eastern Europe (which the last story turns into a brutal folk-horror parable), as well as the contemporary tech-genius cult in America--or, as I said, just straight realist fiction. If it turned out "Elon Musk" was just an alias for or avatar of some sanity-blasting creature from before time, would that really come as much of a surprise?
Later, how about a mashup of Everything Is Illuminated, some fear and loathing, and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"? In which, again, you're too riddled with despair for Cthulhu. Or the horrific consequences of performative cruelty in an RPG, a self-made copy of a copy of a "Hungarian knockoff" of D&D, "but in many ways a better functioning system"? Veres uses cosmic horror in a way I've never quite seen before: someone like Nick Mamatas, say, tosses it in the blender with Kerouac, but imagine this in the mix with Kafka and Kundera and Foer and a whole legion of post-89 cynics raised in a culture where, it seems increasingly clear to them, there will never be any good days, or even sunshine. This is funny, annihilating, and nihilistically funny all at once.
How about cosmic horror as droll capitalist satire? (And also, given where things stand these days, essentially realist fiction.) The corporate-drone one, where a protagonist all too willing to sell his soul to the company store (best line: "every time upper management praised my work, I told them I was doing so well because I genuinely loved Broc Cola. I felt an emotional swelling inside when I said it, because I meant every word, even though management always thought I was being sarcastic") gets the opportunity of a lifetime on a sales trip to another dimension, ruled by a corporation devoted to worshipping a desert-dwelling Lovecraftian entity, is just fabulous. Feels like an exemplary satire of the imposition of casino capitalism on 1990s Eastern Europe (which the last story turns into a brutal folk-horror parable), as well as the contemporary tech-genius cult in America--or, as I said, just straight realist fiction. If it turned out "Elon Musk" was just an alias for or avatar of some sanity-blasting creature from before time, would that really come as much of a surprise?
Later, how about a mashup of Everything Is Illuminated, some fear and loathing, and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"? In which, again, you're too riddled with despair for Cthulhu. Or the horrific consequences of performative cruelty in an RPG, a self-made copy of a copy of a "Hungarian knockoff" of D&D, "but in many ways a better functioning system"? Veres uses cosmic horror in a way I've never quite seen before: someone like Nick Mamatas, say, tosses it in the blender with Kerouac, but imagine this in the mix with Kafka and Kundera and Foer and a whole legion of post-89 cynics raised in a culture where, it seems increasingly clear to them, there will never be any good days, or even sunshine. This is funny, annihilating, and nihilistically funny all at once.
January 27, 2026
Superb collection. "Damage d10+7" is about as close to perfect as you can get.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews