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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.
227 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 26, 2026
Still a solid collection, but didn't live up to The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales for me. Only the first story of six in this one was a five-star read, and that was the only one that was creepy (my horror style preference). The other five stories were mostly a mix of the comical, the cosmic, and social commentary. I will say that I won't forget the image of Cthulhu at a rave any time soon.
April 26, 2026
It won’t, though
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10
TL;DR: Veres has built a horror cosmology out of austerity, employment law, and the exact mechanisms by which systems convert human bodies into value. It is not metaphor. It is precision. Five stories, two minor sags, one ending with nine words that will not leave you. Serious contender for the best weird fiction collection of the year.
The Ratun-Sampi people have a punishment for those who steal teeth. They don’t kill you. They turn you into a story. You are killed into a character in a narrative. An eternal, repeating hellish death, a nightmare with no exit. This is what the unnamed linguist explains to the narrator of “a pit full of teeth,” the opening story of Attila Veres‘ second English-language collection, and I read that paragraph at 11pm and sat very still for about thirty seconds before continuing.
That is what this book does. It doesn’t rush you toward the monster. It tells you exactly how the punishment works, in plain language, and waits for you to understand what that means for the person you’ve been reading about for the last forty pages.
This’ll Make Things a Little Easier is a collection of five stories, long stories, some of them close to novella length, and it operates out of a place that is very specifically Hungary: austerity-battered, bureaucracy-haunted, post-Soviet in its bones, populated by people who have been squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces by forces with no faces and no names. The horror Veres makes from this is not the horror of monsters arriving. It is the horror of discovering that the machinery that was already running you — the institute, the company, the state, the market — has always been monstrous. You just didn’t have a word for it until now.
The prose is flat on the surface and boiling underneath. Veres writes in a register of dry official reportage that keeps sliding into nightmare without raising its voice. His narrators describe the unbearable with the same tone they use to describe rental terms and bank details. When Petra, the protagonist of the title story, realizes her child is crying money from her mouth, the sentence that delivers this does not flinch or widen its eyes. It states it. The horror in Veres is always the horror of exact statement. He is not trying to disturb you by implication. He is disturbing you by being precise.
Here is what I wanted from this book: I wanted the same sick feeling I got from The Black Maybe, his Bram Stoker-nominated debut collection, where I read “Return to Midnight School” on a train and had to put my phone away for a full stop because something that began as a pastoral folk-horror story had done something to me that I was still trying to locate. I wanted that feeling of a hand going through my chest and finding something I didn’t know was there. I got it. Not five times in five stories (I’ll come to the exceptions) but I got it, and I got it badly enough that I finished the book in two sittings and spent an hour afterward just doing dishes, needing to hear faucet sounds and be in a room with normal objects.
What he’s building is a specific cosmology of exploitation. The Institute in “Transistor” (the longest and most punishing story in the collection) extracts value from human bodies in ways that start as labor and end as something that doesn’t have a clinical name in any language I speak. Zsuzsi is eight years old when her family, poor enough to eat borrowed time, accepts a relocation offer. The Institute grows things inside them. This is never stated with the language of science fiction. It is stated with the language of employment law. She is Transistor 47. She produces. She is harvested. She breaks, literally, and it is devastatingly clear that this was always the destination. The horror of “Transistor” is the horror of consent: she agreed to this, in the way you agree to things when the alternative is starving in Borsod, in the way people agree to things when they have already been told that their life is only worth what they can produce. Veres doesn’t make this metaphor explicit. He makes it flesh.
The title story, which closes the collection, is shorter and more ferocious and completely devastating. Petra has been converting her pain into money. There is a tree in the neighborhood. You crawl inside it, you suffer, money comes out. This is the economy as it actually works, with the supernatural element removed for clarity. The ending is the most quietly catastrophic thing I’ve read this year.
Attila Veres was born in Nyíregyháza in 1985 and has been writing horror and weird fiction in Hungary since his debut novel Odakint sötétebb (Darker Outside) landed in 2017. He is a screenwriter with a Hungarian Film Award for Best Television Screenplay on his shelf, for the 2020 feature Lives Recurring. His story “The Time Remaining” was chosen to represent Hungary in Valancourt’s Book of World Horror Stories, and The Black Maybe, his first English-language collection, translated by Luca Karafiáth, was named Rue Morgue’s best collection of 2022. With This’ll Make Things a Little Easier, Veres does his own translation for the first time. The fact that he did it himself matters more than it might appear to. These stories have a very particular flatness, a very particular way of puncturing their own sentences, a very specific relationship between comedy and catastrophe. A translator would have to understand all of that. He understands it because it came from him.
“The Designated Contact Individual” is the funniest story in the collection and also, in its final movement, one of the most alien things I have read in horror in years. A Broc Cola sales rep (Veres opens the story with several paragraphs of actual corporate product description, written with a perfectly straight face) is dispatched to an alternate territory. The way the wrongness accumulates is masterful. The way the horror arrives is through food. There is a scene involving scorpions that made me say something unkind out loud to nobody in particular.
Not everything lands with equal weight. “Damage d10+7,” a tabletop RPG story, starts from an interesting premise about the violence of narrative and what it means to force characters through suffering for other people’s entertainment . Then loses the thread in its middle third, spinning through character backstory that dissipates the dread instead of concentrating it. It recovers. But it’s the only story in the collection that required me to actively trust the book rather than be carried by it. And “The Summer I Chose to Die” which has the best first line in the collection and a premise that could be its best story (a man who has decided to die before summer ends, encountering cosmic monsters on a beach) runs about fifteen pages longer than it needs to. Veres is genuinely funny in that story, and the cosmic horror arrives well, but the rambling drug-addled energy of the narrator eventually becomes its own kind of fog.
These are real criticisms and they’re proportionate. Two stories out of five that have a bit of a soggy stretch in the middle is not a failed collection. It is a collection by a writer who is still discovering the exact length his ideas need, and who is otherwise doing things that very few people in horror are doing at all.
The opening story, “a pit full of teeth,” is about a writer who can’t get out of his own head, who can’t stop the machinery of his own fiction from running, who eventually realizes that the tribe’s punishment, death-by-narrative, a character’s eternal recurring nightmare, has found him. It begins as comic absurdism about the indignities of Hungarian literary life, about Zsoldos Péter Award medals nobody’s heard of and Zoom writing academies for people who just want to believe they’re authors, and it ends inside a cave where something is happening to a dead woman. It is the strangest opening for a collection I have read in a long time, and it is exactly right.
What Veres is doing, across all five stories, is identifying what we have agreed to let be done to us. The Institute. The market. The company. The tree. The narrative. Everything extracts. Everything converts your substance into someone else’s value. The horror is not that these systems are evil. The horror is that they are legible. You understand exactly what they are. You just couldn’t name them until now.
In the Ratun-Sampi tradition, the worst punishment is not death. It is becoming a story someone else tells about you, forever, without your consent.
Hungary has a word for this. It’s called Tuesday.
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10
TL;DR: Veres has built a horror cosmology out of austerity, employment law, and the exact mechanisms by which systems convert human bodies into value. It is not metaphor. It is precision. Five stories, two minor sags, one ending with nine words that will not leave you. Serious contender for the best weird fiction collection of the year.
The Ratun-Sampi people have a punishment for those who steal teeth. They don’t kill you. They turn you into a story. You are killed into a character in a narrative. An eternal, repeating hellish death, a nightmare with no exit. This is what the unnamed linguist explains to the narrator of “a pit full of teeth,” the opening story of Attila Veres‘ second English-language collection, and I read that paragraph at 11pm and sat very still for about thirty seconds before continuing.
That is what this book does. It doesn’t rush you toward the monster. It tells you exactly how the punishment works, in plain language, and waits for you to understand what that means for the person you’ve been reading about for the last forty pages.
This’ll Make Things a Little Easier is a collection of five stories, long stories, some of them close to novella length, and it operates out of a place that is very specifically Hungary: austerity-battered, bureaucracy-haunted, post-Soviet in its bones, populated by people who have been squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces by forces with no faces and no names. The horror Veres makes from this is not the horror of monsters arriving. It is the horror of discovering that the machinery that was already running you — the institute, the company, the state, the market — has always been monstrous. You just didn’t have a word for it until now.
The prose is flat on the surface and boiling underneath. Veres writes in a register of dry official reportage that keeps sliding into nightmare without raising its voice. His narrators describe the unbearable with the same tone they use to describe rental terms and bank details. When Petra, the protagonist of the title story, realizes her child is crying money from her mouth, the sentence that delivers this does not flinch or widen its eyes. It states it. The horror in Veres is always the horror of exact statement. He is not trying to disturb you by implication. He is disturbing you by being precise.
Here is what I wanted from this book: I wanted the same sick feeling I got from The Black Maybe, his Bram Stoker-nominated debut collection, where I read “Return to Midnight School” on a train and had to put my phone away for a full stop because something that began as a pastoral folk-horror story had done something to me that I was still trying to locate. I wanted that feeling of a hand going through my chest and finding something I didn’t know was there. I got it. Not five times in five stories (I’ll come to the exceptions) but I got it, and I got it badly enough that I finished the book in two sittings and spent an hour afterward just doing dishes, needing to hear faucet sounds and be in a room with normal objects.
What he’s building is a specific cosmology of exploitation. The Institute in “Transistor” (the longest and most punishing story in the collection) extracts value from human bodies in ways that start as labor and end as something that doesn’t have a clinical name in any language I speak. Zsuzsi is eight years old when her family, poor enough to eat borrowed time, accepts a relocation offer. The Institute grows things inside them. This is never stated with the language of science fiction. It is stated with the language of employment law. She is Transistor 47. She produces. She is harvested. She breaks, literally, and it is devastatingly clear that this was always the destination. The horror of “Transistor” is the horror of consent: she agreed to this, in the way you agree to things when the alternative is starving in Borsod, in the way people agree to things when they have already been told that their life is only worth what they can produce. Veres doesn’t make this metaphor explicit. He makes it flesh.
The title story, which closes the collection, is shorter and more ferocious and completely devastating. Petra has been converting her pain into money. There is a tree in the neighborhood. You crawl inside it, you suffer, money comes out. This is the economy as it actually works, with the supernatural element removed for clarity. The ending is the most quietly catastrophic thing I’ve read this year.
Attila Veres was born in Nyíregyháza in 1985 and has been writing horror and weird fiction in Hungary since his debut novel Odakint sötétebb (Darker Outside) landed in 2017. He is a screenwriter with a Hungarian Film Award for Best Television Screenplay on his shelf, for the 2020 feature Lives Recurring. His story “The Time Remaining” was chosen to represent Hungary in Valancourt’s Book of World Horror Stories, and The Black Maybe, his first English-language collection, translated by Luca Karafiáth, was named Rue Morgue’s best collection of 2022. With This’ll Make Things a Little Easier, Veres does his own translation for the first time. The fact that he did it himself matters more than it might appear to. These stories have a very particular flatness, a very particular way of puncturing their own sentences, a very specific relationship between comedy and catastrophe. A translator would have to understand all of that. He understands it because it came from him.
“The Designated Contact Individual” is the funniest story in the collection and also, in its final movement, one of the most alien things I have read in horror in years. A Broc Cola sales rep (Veres opens the story with several paragraphs of actual corporate product description, written with a perfectly straight face) is dispatched to an alternate territory. The way the wrongness accumulates is masterful. The way the horror arrives is through food. There is a scene involving scorpions that made me say something unkind out loud to nobody in particular.
Not everything lands with equal weight. “Damage d10+7,” a tabletop RPG story, starts from an interesting premise about the violence of narrative and what it means to force characters through suffering for other people’s entertainment . Then loses the thread in its middle third, spinning through character backstory that dissipates the dread instead of concentrating it. It recovers. But it’s the only story in the collection that required me to actively trust the book rather than be carried by it. And “The Summer I Chose to Die” which has the best first line in the collection and a premise that could be its best story (a man who has decided to die before summer ends, encountering cosmic monsters on a beach) runs about fifteen pages longer than it needs to. Veres is genuinely funny in that story, and the cosmic horror arrives well, but the rambling drug-addled energy of the narrator eventually becomes its own kind of fog.
These are real criticisms and they’re proportionate. Two stories out of five that have a bit of a soggy stretch in the middle is not a failed collection. It is a collection by a writer who is still discovering the exact length his ideas need, and who is otherwise doing things that very few people in horror are doing at all.
The opening story, “a pit full of teeth,” is about a writer who can’t get out of his own head, who can’t stop the machinery of his own fiction from running, who eventually realizes that the tribe’s punishment, death-by-narrative, a character’s eternal recurring nightmare, has found him. It begins as comic absurdism about the indignities of Hungarian literary life, about Zsoldos Péter Award medals nobody’s heard of and Zoom writing academies for people who just want to believe they’re authors, and it ends inside a cave where something is happening to a dead woman. It is the strangest opening for a collection I have read in a long time, and it is exactly right.
What Veres is doing, across all five stories, is identifying what we have agreed to let be done to us. The Institute. The market. The company. The tree. The narrative. Everything extracts. Everything converts your substance into someone else’s value. The horror is not that these systems are evil. The horror is that they are legible. You understand exactly what they are. You just couldn’t name them until now.
In the Ratun-Sampi tradition, the worst punishment is not death. It is becoming a story someone else tells about you, forever, without your consent.
Hungary has a word for this. It’s called Tuesday.
April 4, 2026
So good! I knew this book was going to be killer but it still wound up totally exceeding my expectations. I liked all six stories, but two in particular are going to stay with me for a long time: ‘a pit full of teeth’ was Lovecraftian in all the best ways, while Damage d10+7 was hauntingly grimy.
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 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.
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.
April 15, 2026
4.25/5
Last year my book club read Veres' first collection, The Black Maybe, and loved it. This one is on the same level, albeit shorter. There was one absolute 5/5 stand out, and I rated every story 3.25 stars or above. I'm usually annoying and actually calculate the average to determine my final rating, but all together this one "feels" like a 4.25/5 perfectly represents my enjoyment of the book.
Note - Attila Veres did his own translation for this one and he did an admirable job. The Black Maybe was, however, a touch more cleanly translated.
'a pit full of teeth' (3.5/5) - Second weakest of the collection, some interesting ideas it would have been fun to develop more, but sinks a bit too far into a kind of predictable absurdity for my taste.
Transistor (5+/5!!) - EXCEPTIONAL, no hints or spoilers for what this one is about - it's the only story not represented in the blurb, and it's best read blind.
The Designated Contact Individual (4.25/5) - This one ties into the previous story (there is some light overlap with a few stories), and also brings back the travel guide, Jufus, from my least favorite story in Veres' last collection. This story is much better than that one. More strengths than weaknesses.
Damage d10+7 (3.75/5) - Mixed bag. I love tabletop RPG based stories, but this one combined that with a few different flavors of trauma that felt out of the blue, and a fairly predictable ending.
The Summer I Chose to Die (4/5) - Straight up Lovecraftian, and a decent entry, but I wanted something more, especially after something that happens near the end. I expect his next collection might include something like a sequel/extension.
This'll Make Things a Little Easier (3.25/5) - Weakest of the collection. I feel like I've read and seen this idea done before multiple times, and this is the only story that is really local-politics infused. There are hints of criticism of the Hungarian government through many of the stories, but this one is explicit. I know absolutely nothing about the political landscape of Hungary, and knowledge is assumed, so I just could not get into it.
Last year my book club read Veres' first collection, The Black Maybe, and loved it. This one is on the same level, albeit shorter. There was one absolute 5/5 stand out, and I rated every story 3.25 stars or above. I'm usually annoying and actually calculate the average to determine my final rating, but all together this one "feels" like a 4.25/5 perfectly represents my enjoyment of the book.
Note - Attila Veres did his own translation for this one and he did an admirable job. The Black Maybe was, however, a touch more cleanly translated.
'a pit full of teeth' (3.5/5) - Second weakest of the collection, some interesting ideas it would have been fun to develop more, but sinks a bit too far into a kind of predictable absurdity for my taste.
Transistor (5+/5!!) - EXCEPTIONAL, no hints or spoilers for what this one is about - it's the only story not represented in the blurb, and it's best read blind.
The Designated Contact Individual (4.25/5) - This one ties into the previous story (there is some light overlap with a few stories), and also brings back the travel guide, Jufus, from my least favorite story in Veres' last collection. This story is much better than that one. More strengths than weaknesses.
Damage d10+7 (3.75/5) - Mixed bag. I love tabletop RPG based stories, but this one combined that with a few different flavors of trauma that felt out of the blue, and a fairly predictable ending.
The Summer I Chose to Die (4/5) - Straight up Lovecraftian, and a decent entry, but I wanted something more, especially after something that happens near the end. I expect his next collection might include something like a sequel/extension.
This'll Make Things a Little Easier (3.25/5) - Weakest of the collection. I feel like I've read and seen this idea done before multiple times, and this is the only story that is really local-politics infused. There are hints of criticism of the Hungarian government through many of the stories, but this one is explicit. I know absolutely nothing about the political landscape of Hungary, and knowledge is assumed, so I just could not get into it.
April 13, 2026
Another masterpiece of cosmic horror and terror, THIS'LL MAKE THINGS A LITTLE EASIER seeps and seethes with dread and unease. Attila Veres' newest collection is a dazzling foray into various Hells; a bleak, dark delight of utterly unique, unforgettable new nightmares that will haunt you.
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.
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.
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!
April 24, 2026
Brilliant. I got that same excitement reading these as I did when I first picked up Mariana Enriquez.
The 6 tales are shocking, scary, darkly funny, bitingly satirical, thought provoking and on occasion, bat shit crazy.
Unlike a lot of short story collections I don't think there is a bad one here.
'The Summer I Chose to Die' was probably the weakest entry but it was still a solid 3/5. And it also has my favourite line in the whole collection: "It's good to know that every decision I have made or ever will make is essentially meaningless. It takes the pressure off. But I live in Hungary, so that's no big surprise."
I mean, how could you not love a book with a line like that?
The 6 tales are shocking, scary, darkly funny, bitingly satirical, thought provoking and on occasion, bat shit crazy.
Unlike a lot of short story collections I don't think there is a bad one here.
'The Summer I Chose to Die' was probably the weakest entry but it was still a solid 3/5. And it also has my favourite line in the whole collection: "It's good to know that every decision I have made or ever will make is essentially meaningless. It takes the pressure off. But I live in Hungary, so that's no big surprise."
I mean, how could you not love a book with a line like that?
April 8, 2026
Another knockout from Veres, whose sensibility is really like no one else out there - cosmic horror, black comedy, nightmarish body horror, and so much more, all in a surreal package that constantly unnerves. I think The Black Maybe might be a touch better, but both are fantastic. If you're up for adventurous, nightmarish horror that often finds a way to hit you with its wry sensibility about modern capitalist hells right before plunging you into terror, well, look no further.
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.
April 8, 2026
There are some wonderfully weird stories here. The ones that delve into cosmic horror feel unique. I think my favorite, and the one that I will keep thinking about most, is the opener - a pit full of teeth. I fascinating idea that I wish was explored further and/or continued in the following stories.
Transistor and Damage d10+7 were also highlights.
Transistor and Damage d10+7 were also highlights.
May 11, 2026
Pretty weird book. I was interested when I was reading it, just to see what happened, so it was entertaining. But the stories were so bizarre for the most part that they lost me a bit. Hard to enjoy stuff you're reading and thinking "Huh?!?" at (but out of confusion rather than shock)
January 27, 2026
Superb collection. "Damage d10+7" is about as close to perfect as you can get.
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