The Black Maybe is Attila Veres’s first English-language collection. It’s subtitled “Liminal Tales,” and this is an appropriate description. Many of the stories take place in remote locations, places where our world seems to overlap with some other place.
My two favorite stories were “Fogtown” and “The Amber Complex.” I’ve always been a fan of stories about media with some kind of eerie aspect, like “Candle Cove” and Sarah Pinsker’s “Two Truths and a Lie,” and “Fogtown” is a standout example of that subgenre. (It also reminds me a great deal of John Langan’s “Outside the House, Watching for the Crows,” to the point where I wondered if the two writers know each other.) “The Amber Complex” is notable for the wonderfully vivid descriptions of the visions experienced by the characters.
Interestingly, two of the other stories in the collection, “Return to the Midnight School” and “The Black Maybe,” are very similar in subject matter. Both concern farms where the crops being harvested are supernatural in essence. Again, there’s a thematic connection to other modern weird fiction, as both of these reminded me of Josh Malerman’s online serialized novel Carpenter’s Farm.
A couple of the stories have elements of parody or black humor to them. Remember the moral panic about the supposed Satanic influences on rock music, and later, heavy metal? In “Sky Filled With Crows, Then Nothing at All,” a demon uses heavy metal to try and make a teenaged Antichrist get with the program…and it does not turn out the way he expects. “Multiplied by Zero” reads like a product testimonial, in this case for a travel agency, except that the agency specializes in Lovecraftian destinations.
Overall, this is an excellent collection, and I hope Veres is able to get more of his work published in English.
Outside of a Dog 