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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.
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
220 pages, Hardcover
First published March 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 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.
March 14, 2026
“It’s good to know that every decision I’ve made or ever will make is essentially meaningless. It takes the pressure off. But I live in Hungary, so it’s no big surprise.”
Attila Veres is Hungarian. Each story in this collection wrestles with this fact, as its characters go to extreme lengths—and I do mean extreme—to pay their bills and lead their lives with some sense of dignity, no matter how mutated that dignity may end up being in a country portrayed as in decline.
I know very little about Hungry. It surprised me to learn that it is extremely socially conservative, yet still maintains universal healthcare and free college education programs. That reminded me that the flavor of conservatism that exists in the USA is quite specific to us. In other countries, an old, right wing religious fundamentalist man would fight passionately for his right to free healthcare.
I’m not sure how this relates back to Veres’ fiction, so I’ll force it along by saying this: reality is never fixed. One’s subjective experience does not define existence. The characters in this collection are all more or less acting out of places of economic and spiritual desperation. Without any sense of national pride, any stable family structure, or any solid economic footing, they must resort to dark magic to make ends meet.
In “Transistor,” a young girl is encouraged by her family to leave her job at a nightmarish factory to instead work another, slightly better job in which she is drained of her life force to fuel the strange travel of inter-dimensional salespeople. In the next story, “The Designated Contact Individual,” we get to see one of these salesmen as he travels to a bizarro Pyongyang-esque city to sell cola…and the residents of said city have very bizarre intentions for said soda.
The collection is bookended by its two shortest and arguably most accessible stories: “a pit full of teeth,” which reads quite a bit like Brian Evenson, and the title story, “This’ll Make Things a Little Easier,” which is like a downbeat, sinister take on “The Giving Tree.”
I was thrilled by this collection and am really looking forward to whatever Veres comes up with next. Even if you are burnt out on the Kafka-esque, I’d say Veres’ strange and vivid imagination really sets these stories apart. The effect is mind altering.
Attila Veres is Hungarian. Each story in this collection wrestles with this fact, as its characters go to extreme lengths—and I do mean extreme—to pay their bills and lead their lives with some sense of dignity, no matter how mutated that dignity may end up being in a country portrayed as in decline.
I know very little about Hungry. It surprised me to learn that it is extremely socially conservative, yet still maintains universal healthcare and free college education programs. That reminded me that the flavor of conservatism that exists in the USA is quite specific to us. In other countries, an old, right wing religious fundamentalist man would fight passionately for his right to free healthcare.
I’m not sure how this relates back to Veres’ fiction, so I’ll force it along by saying this: reality is never fixed. One’s subjective experience does not define existence. The characters in this collection are all more or less acting out of places of economic and spiritual desperation. Without any sense of national pride, any stable family structure, or any solid economic footing, they must resort to dark magic to make ends meet.
In “Transistor,” a young girl is encouraged by her family to leave her job at a nightmarish factory to instead work another, slightly better job in which she is drained of her life force to fuel the strange travel of inter-dimensional salespeople. In the next story, “The Designated Contact Individual,” we get to see one of these salesmen as he travels to a bizarro Pyongyang-esque city to sell cola…and the residents of said city have very bizarre intentions for said soda.
The collection is bookended by its two shortest and arguably most accessible stories: “a pit full of teeth,” which reads quite a bit like Brian Evenson, and the title story, “This’ll Make Things a Little Easier,” which is like a downbeat, sinister take on “The Giving Tree.”
I was thrilled by this collection and am really looking forward to whatever Veres comes up with next. Even if you are burnt out on the Kafka-esque, I’d say Veres’ strange and vivid imagination really sets these stories apart. The effect is mind altering.
February 24, 2026
I'll try to record my impressions while they're fresh.
The Black Maybe, the author recent debut collection had left a very strong impression on me, so strong I'd say Veres is among the 10 most exciting living authors for me.
Therefore, it'd be an understatement to say I was eagerly waiting for his second collection which is now finally out in the dawn of 2026.
Don't second books have a reputation as in, it's hard to follow a successful first book? possibly there's some truth in this statement. Anyway I've been ever so slightly disappointed with this one. Had it been his debut I might nevertheless have been under the spell but...it isn't.
What this tome manages to achieve and this has correctly been mentioned in another review here, is to convey a subtext of societal criticism which is very well done, no doubt, it has a Ligottian whiff, especially Teatro Obscuro, in describing human alienation through quotidian horror. It is somehow more high brow than the previous collection, it is Kafkaesque, Borgesian even not mentioning Bruno Shulz and Lovecraft. Sounds good right? but for me where the shoe pinches is that as Veres at times reaches the pinnacles of some of the above authors he has lost some of the Veresian blood of his first collection.
In other words, for all the qualities of the present stories, I liked none as much as those featured in the Black Maybe which were more idiosyncratic, more weirdly Hungarian.
having said that I still tremendously enjoyed This Will Make Things a Little Easier, I will also always remember some images the author has created, the trees in the eponymous story, the russian hard bass club in the parallel world and the faery in the role play game are some of them.
The Black Maybe, the author recent debut collection had left a very strong impression on me, so strong I'd say Veres is among the 10 most exciting living authors for me.
Therefore, it'd be an understatement to say I was eagerly waiting for his second collection which is now finally out in the dawn of 2026.
Don't second books have a reputation as in, it's hard to follow a successful first book? possibly there's some truth in this statement. Anyway I've been ever so slightly disappointed with this one. Had it been his debut I might nevertheless have been under the spell but...it isn't.
What this tome manages to achieve and this has correctly been mentioned in another review here, is to convey a subtext of societal criticism which is very well done, no doubt, it has a Ligottian whiff, especially Teatro Obscuro, in describing human alienation through quotidian horror. It is somehow more high brow than the previous collection, it is Kafkaesque, Borgesian even not mentioning Bruno Shulz and Lovecraft. Sounds good right? but for me where the shoe pinches is that as Veres at times reaches the pinnacles of some of the above authors he has lost some of the Veresian blood of his first collection.
In other words, for all the qualities of the present stories, I liked none as much as those featured in the Black Maybe which were more idiosyncratic, more weirdly Hungarian.
having said that I still tremendously enjoyed This Will Make Things a Little Easier, I will also always remember some images the author has created, the trees in the eponymous story, the russian hard bass club in the parallel world and the faery in the role play game are some of them.
March 13, 2026
A solid collection of weird tales of a distorted Hungary, where systematic inequalities and cultural malaise slowly spiral into cosmic horror, sending capitalist drones to lands beyond time, bringing drug-addled burnouts face to face with Cthulhu, and turning language into a tangible sensory organ that reaches beyond the pages of fiction. Interestingly, Veres did his own translation, which I have found is unusual in publishing, even for authors who are perfectly fluent in more than one language. He did an excellent job, and I would never have guessed I was reading a non-native speaker. As someone slowly learning Spanish, this is a skill level I simply cannot comprehend.
February 27, 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 servicing 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 literalizes into 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 an avatar of some sanity-blasting tentacled 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 savagely satirical, 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 servicing 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 literalizes into 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 an avatar of some sanity-blasting tentacled 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 savagely satirical, annihilating, and nihilistically funny all at once.
February 25, 2026
I was so excited for a new collection from this author (The Black Maybe was a top read for me a few years ago) and it did not disappoint. The first story ('a pit full of teeth') was my favorite, but I think they'll all stick with me for a bit.
January 27, 2026
Superb collection. "Damage d10+7" is about as close to perfect as you can get.
February 23, 2026
These stories are just as weird as Veres' stories in The Black Maybe, but these new ones hit harder. There is tragedy here that imbues the weird with the terrifying. Another great collection!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews