The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales

by Attila Veres, Steve Rasnic Tem (Introduction)

Overview

Attila Veres, Hungary's leading horror writer, makes his English debut at last in this groundbreaking new collection featuring ten of his finest tales. The volume opens with 'To Bite a Dog', in which a man's budding relationship is jeopardized by his girlfriend's bizarre and macabre habit involving dogs. 'Fogtown' tells of a legendary '90s rock band whose music nobody has ever actually heard but which might nonetheless spell doom for a man obsessed with finding their recordings. 'Multiplied by Zero' is a wry travelogue in which a man recounts his hellish experiences on a holiday tour exploring Lovecraftian landscapes. And in the title story 'The Black Maybe', which Steve Rasnic Tem calls 'one of the weirdest tales I've read in years', a girl and her family escape the city bustle to experience farm life, only to discover with unimaginable horror the truth of what is really being harvested there.

These tales showcase a range of genres and styles, from weird fiction to folk horror to cosmic horror, and reveal a dazzlingly original new writer whose stories are thrilling, frightening, often blackly humorous, and totally unlike anything you have read before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954321700
Publisher:	Valancourt Books
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Pages:	310
Sales rank:	597,368
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2022

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Best Horror Collection of 2022 (Rue Morgue)

"[Veres'] world is unique, bleak, terrifying and all his own. Whether it's urban fables of rock music, harvests that claim souls, Aickmanesque situations or an amazing take on cosmic horror, his vision is always stunning. These stories, his debut in English, will blow you away." - Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and Our Share of Night

"The ten 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 ... These tales wear their resistance to conventional horror tropes and formulas as a badge of honor. Readers are sure to be impressed." - Publishers Weekly

"Every decade or so, a writer comes along who reconfigures the way we think about the Weird. First Thomas Ligotti, then Laird Barron, and now Attila Veres. An astonishing collection, really unlike anything out there, which suggests a new way forward." - ​Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

"The Black Maybe by Attila Veres, continued to surprise me, story by story, front to rear cover ... I was reminded of reading Barker's Books of Blood for the first time ... 'Walks Among You' is one of the best Lovecraftian stories I have encountered." - Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

"These stories dwell in the in-between places of life and death, that place where nightmares wait to be harvested. These are your nightmares, or they soon will be, so settle in for an excursion to a horrific mental, emotional, and spiritual landscape like no other. A brilliant work." - Elizabeth Engstrom, author of When Darkness Loves Us and Black Ambrosia

"A stunning parade of terrors surreal and horrors sublime. The uncanny stories in The Black Maybe are as originally chilling and imaginatively dangerous as anything you'll read this decade, if not your lifetime, and Attila Veres deserves the worldwide acclaim this inventive work of horror will surely bring him. His approach is genuinely fresh. No maybes about it: this book is pitch black and totally engrossing." - Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Proverbs for Monsters

"Attila Veres is fiendishly talented. Certain images in The Black Maybe caused me to glance at the darkened corners of my office as I read into the wee hours." ​- Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

"Original, brilliant, distinctive. These masterful stories by Attila Veres are a breath of fresh air from out of the darkness." - Michael Cisco, award-winning author of The Divinity Student

"Prepare for visions as unsettling as any you'll read this year." - Spectrum Magazine

"The Black Maybe, by Attila Veres, is a refreshing blast of cold cellar air. The horror is insidious and surreal, slowly chewing away what you think is real until you find yourself surrounded by a nightmare. I love this book!" ​- Nathan Ballingrud, author of Wounds and North American Lake Monsters

From the Publisher

09/01/2022

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

Library Journal