The Black Maybe

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.’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’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’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