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 lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
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