Books
‘This’ll Make Things a Little Easier’ Review – Another Can’t-Miss Collection of Horror Tales
At this point, it’s a cliché to drop a phrase like “No one’s doing it like Attila Veres,” but clichés become clichés because they’re true. With his 2022 collection The Black Maybe, Veres announced himself to a global audience as a one-of-a-kind imagination and a weaver of nuanced, unpredictable tales.
Now he’s back with another collection of stories, and they prove that cliched phrase is still true: No one is doing it like Attila Veres.
In This’ll Make Things a Little Easier, which the author translated himself from his native Hungarian, Veres brings together half a dozen stories that run the gamut from fantasy to science fiction to all-out terror, each of them a dazzling blend of genres and sensibilities, each of them singular. In the opening story, “a pit full of teeth,” Veres follows an author not unlike himself whose work is translated into an unreadable language, with terrifying results. In “Transistor,” a woman looks back on her life’s work as a conduit for forces that slowly devour her, and in the follow-up tale, “The Designated Contact Individual,” we learn what she was working toward. Then there’s the title story, in which the government installs strange new trees meant to solve money problems for citizens, but there’s a terrible price to be paid.
In each of these tales, and the others which make up the collection, Veres plays with a particular set of ingredients, chronicling what happens when a system meant to uphold certain norms is upended, either robbing characters of their grip on reality or remaking it altogether. Whether they’re forced by their employers to shovel a mysterious substance known as “Mud” into their mouths all day or gifted money trees that exact a heavy toll, each of the characters in these stories is pulled, often in many directions at once, by forces greater than themselves, both cosmic and mundane.
Every story in This’ll Make Things a Little Easier hums with Veres’ singular style, a mixture of the esoteric, the comic, and the deeply unsettling. They are stories capable of horrifying and delighting in equal measure on each page, sometimes within each paragraph, and nowhere is that more apparent than the story which, for me, stands as the collection’s centerpiece.
In “Damage d10+7,” a group of friends playing a homebrewed RPG decide to push the accuracy of their characters into a truly dark place, setting off the unraveling of a fictional world carefully maintained by the game’s master. It’s a wonderful concept for a story, and it’s also a stellar example of Veres’ gift for pacing out a story. The concept draws you in, the catalyst for the narrative shocks you, and then the story pushes further, out into unknown territory, as the characters reckon with the shockwaves of what’s happened and question everything they think they know.
The unpredictability of Veres’ stories makes them thrilling to read, but his storytelling style is about so much more than swerving on readers who think they see a horror formula developing in a predictable way. In all six of these stories, we are treated to a creative mind that refuses to stop at the water’s edge, or even in the knee-deep cool of an oncoming tide. In every tale, Veres wants to go deeper, to pull us under in the darkness beneath the rippling surface. These aren’t just stories but excavations, and their combination of sly grace and endlessly unnerving imagery makes them irresistible, no matter how deep Veres dares to go.
If you still haven’t discovered the wonder of Attila Veres’ writing, this is a great place to start. It’s a wonderful follow-up to The Black Maybe, which proves Veres still has much, much more to show us, and an essential horror fiction collection for 2026.
This’ll Make Things a Little Easier is in bookstores now.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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