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.
