The Black Maybe

August 15, 2022
The 10 macabre tales that make up Veres’s English-language debut stake their scares on their wildly unpredictable plots. All Veres’s stories begin in realistically grounded settings before veering unexpectedly into territory rife with unforeseeable and surreal menaces. “Fogtown” is presented as the scattered notes of a rock journalist who succumbs to the fatal allure of a band whose only legacy, having never released an album, is the weird effect their music had on those who saw them live. “Multiplied by Zero” is one of several stories that evoke H.P. Lovecraft, in this instance through a tongue-in-cheek travelogue chronicling the narrator’s excursion into a dark and dangerous otherworld. It has a companion piece in “In the Snow, Sleeping,” about a young couple’s sojourn at a vacation outpost that deteriorates into rot and decay before their eyes. These tales wear their resistance to conventional horror tropes and formulas as a badge of honor. Readers are sure to be impressed.

September 15, 2022
Veres, Hungary's leading horror author, was first brought to the attention of English-speaking readers in the critically acclaimed first volume of The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories (2020). In his full-length, English-language debut, a collection of original stories situated at the sensory threshold where dread teeters on the precipice of terror, Veres presents 10 tales covering a range of horror subgenres united by an unnerving, matter-of-fact narration, contemporary settings, and a quick flip from mundane to sinister. The stories are set either in urban centers, like the creepy, found-document-framed "Fogtown," featuring an obscure but possibly deadly rock band, or rural locales, such as the immersive and beguiling "Return to the Midnight School," where what appears to be a zombie story grows into an original, weird, and disquieting nightmare. Horror master Steve Rasnic Tem, who writes the introduction, is a great read-alike here, but the feel of Veres' stories also has a lot in common with Asian horror creators such as Nadia Bulkin and Junji Ito.

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September 1, 2022

DEBUT From Hungarian author Veres, this is a profoundly unsettling collection of horror short stories. The stories range from travelogues of eldritch horrors in "Multiplied by Zero," the impoverished weirdness of rural landscapes in the title story "The Black Maybe," and dark tales of the city, such as "Fogtown." Each tale wraps you in the crisp concise language of the author and translator and whisks you away to horrors spanning from cosmic darkness to the traumas of childhood. It seems that every story is an earworm of terror that will stick with the reader long after the collection is returned, an almost perfect short story collection. Veres's debut collection is startlingly unique, but tonally similar read-alikes that might appeal include H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and Kathe Koja's Velocities. VERDICT An excellent addition for libraries looking to expand their horror collection with gripping and innovative content.--Jeremiah Paddock

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