This’ll Make Things a Little Easier

Attila Veres’ The Black Maybe was hailed as one of the best horror debuts in years and was chosen as Rue Morgue‘s best collection of 2022 and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Critics compared it to debuts by 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 ‘a pit full of teeth’, a writer finds out that one of his stories will be translated into an extremely obscure language. But when his copy of the book arrives, it doesn’t match what he wrote: instead, the text contains a much more horrific narrative that may 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. The narrator in ‘The Summer I Chose to Die’ is ready to give up on life, until 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 government tries to alleviate poverty by supplying families with a strange new plant species, but their newfound financial gain comes 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.