The Black Maybe by Attila Veres is a short fiction collection that does something uncommon: it makes the familiar feel wrong before it tells you why. Veres is a Hungarian author largely unknown to English-language readers before this collection's translation, and that unfamiliarity is part of what the book exploits. The folklore sitting beneath these stories doesn't announce itself. It seeps.
What the collection is and where it comes from
Published in English translation by Valancourt Books, The Black Maybe collects 14 stories originally written in Hungarian. The translator is Eva Voisin, and the English prose lands with a quality that's neither stiff nor overly smoothed. It reads like something that grew in a different soil. That's a compliment. Horror fiction translated from Central and Eastern European traditions carries rhythms and preoccupations that American and British genre fiction simply doesn't replicate, and Veres exploits this gap shrewdly.
The title itself resists easy interpretation. "The Black Maybe" isn't a creature or a place. It's a condition. A state of not-knowing that curdles into dread. Veres returns to this idea across the collection: the horror isn't what's there, it's what might be, the thing your mind assembles from partial evidence. He's working in a tradition closer to Kathe Koja's obsessive negative spaces than to any conventional ghost story.
The stories themselves: what works and what doesn't
The collection opens with "The Screaming of the Rabbit," a story about a rural family, a sick animal, and the way shame calcifies into ritual. It's the best possible entry point. Veres establishes his method immediately: long, patient observation of social texture, then a single detail that retrospectively rewrites everything you thought you'd understood. The rabbits don't explain themselves. They don't need to.
"Faun" is the collection's strangest piece. A woman tracks a creature through a city park with the matter-of-fact persistence of someone completing an errand. Veres writes mundane procedure with unsettling precision. His characters don't panic. They adjust. That adjustment is what frightens you, because it implies the world they live in requires it.
Three stories in the middle section deal with children, and they're the ones most likely to stay with you. Veres understands that children in horror work best when they're not victims and not agents of evil, but something in between: observers who understand more than they should and less than they think. "What the Mud Says" runs on this tension for twelve pages without releasing it once.
Not every story lands. "The Glass Garden" overstays its welcome by about four pages, and "The Interval" never quite coheres, its central metaphor straining against a plot that can't carry it. In a fourteen-story collection, three weak entries is survivable. The strong ones are strong enough to compensate.
Style, atmosphere, and the question of influence
Veres doesn't write like Thomas Ligotti, though the comparison gets made. He's less interested in philosophical futility and more interested in social horror, the way communities absorb and redistribute their worst secrets. His closest English-language parallel might be John Langan's approach to the literary horror story: serious about craft, attentive to character interiority, willing to let a story breathe for two thousand words before showing its teeth.
What's distinctly Veres is the role of the body. Illness, physical decay, and bodily transformation appear in at least eight of these fourteen stories. Not body horror in the visceral, explicit tradition: Veres isn't interested in gore. He's interested in the body as a site of evidence. Something has happened here. The flesh knows before the mind admits it.
The pacing is slow by contemporary commercial standards. Readers expecting rapid revelation will find the collection frustrating. Readers who liked the patience of Negative Space by B.R. Yeager or any fiction that treats dread as something to be earned rather than delivered will find a lot here.
Translation and the limits of what's available
One honest caveat: reviewing translated fiction is reviewing a collaboration. Eva Voisin's work reads as skilled, but without access to the Hungarian originals, it's impossible to know where Veres ends and the translation begins. This matters for a writer whose effects depend so precisely on sentence rhythm. What's certain is that the translated text produces the right reactions: unease, curiosity, occasional genuine fear. Whether those reactions map perfectly onto what Hungarian readers experience is a question this review can't answer.
Veres has published more work in Hungarian that hasn't yet been translated. If The Black Maybe finds the English-language audience it deserves, that situation may change.
The verdict
The Black Maybe by Attila Veres is the most interesting horror short fiction debut in English translation in recent memory. It's not perfect. The weakest stories are genuinely weak. But the strongest ones, "The Screaming of the Rabbit," "Faun," "What the Mud Says," and "The Corridor of Beasts," are the kind of stories you return to six months later wondering if you missed something. You probably did. That's the point.
If you read horror fiction seriously, this collection belongs on your shelf. Veres is a writer worth tracking.