"I have nightmares before each publication. Once I dreamed that I visited a bookstore and discovered that the book I was working on at that time had already been published. I took the book off the shelf and saw that it was my unfinished, unedited, and uncorrected manuscript that the editor had accidentally published. It was terrible and it was one of those nightmares that last a long time," he recounts with a smile to La Lectura the Hungarian screenwriter and writer Attila Veres (Nyíregyháza, 1985), a prominent current figure in Central European horror literature, showing that an author's nightmares are sweeter than his writings.
"In reality, I rarely intend to write a purely horror story, but my ideas and a certain way of thinking lead me in that direction. What I find interesting in a story usually brings with it an idea of horror, so my stories are often labeled as horror," explains the writer. "I don't mind because I love the genre, and being a horror writer is very rewarding. I like horror because it is conflicting. I want my stories to stay engraved in the reader's mind, to haunt them, to raise questions about the world around them, questions they must try to answer for themselves... And horror provides the perfect framework for that," he asserts.
Visiting Spain to participate in the Barcelona Fantastic Genres Festival -which runs until the 10th and where he will rub shoulders with authors like Catriona Ward, Javier Calvo, Lisa Yaszek, Slovej Balle, Ted Chiang, or Lisa Tuttle-, Veres has just published in our country 'The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales', a collection of 12 unsettling and original stories where he blends urban terror and folk horror or more classic Lovecraftian elements with groundbreaking and modern visions. Far from pigeonholing himself in the genre, in these tales the author naturally transitions from sharp political criticism to tender intimacy, all filtered through ironic and satirical humor and an approach to everyday reality from which the shadows that haunt us or that we all carry within emerge.
In this sense, Veres argues that horror is an ideal genre to explore human experiences and experiences, certain limits that we only break in extreme situations. "Terror is capable of maximum honesty. The central concern of horror literature is the human experience itself and nothing more," defends the writer. "It speaks of our fears, anxieties, desires, hopes to the extreme, without the limitations of respectability and without the constraints of morality. Without these limitations, it is easier to get to the heart of the matter without worrying about offending anyone, because, in a sense, it is expected to be offensive."
"Terror is capable of maximum honesty. The central concern of horror literature is the human experience itself and nothing more"
In 'The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales', we find stories where ordinary life is shattered by the most unlikely causes: spas where vacations turn sinister and deadly in "We Will Sleep in the Snow," remote villages where ancestral traditions hide hidden terrors in the titular story, vacations that lead to the most terrible madness in "Multiplied by Zero," a reflection on relationships that turns brutally violent in "To bite a Dog", and even a ghostly urban band that seems to induce suicide in those who listen to it in "City of Mist."
In all of them, many of the characters, many of them narrators, undergo a process of change when faced with situations that should not happen initially. "What I like most about this forced change, this metamorphosis, is the idea that you lose control of your own being. I often think that my stories ultimately describe experiences that are positive for my characters, even if that means that at the end of their metamorphosis, they no longer exist as people and become monstrous beings," Veres points out.
"The thing is that they face something much bigger than themselves and, instead of being destroyed by it, they transform into what they feared or must submit to it. After this transformation, they no longer need to fear anything because they have abandoned the illusion of control over their own lives, even over themselves, and that fact serves to reflect on many contemporary realities such as alienation or dissatisfaction," he maintains.
"I don't think horror can exist without humor. My stories arise from the absurdity of the human experience, and without the comedy of it, they wouldn't work"
Also by Mariana Enriquez, author of a masterful prologue that the writer appreciates: "Things We Lost in the Fireis one of the best collections I have ever read," so I am especially happy and grateful that she has been kind enough to write an introduction to my book," Veres shares, who also declares himself a fan of Samanta Schweblin, Amparo Dávila, Roberto Bolaño, Mónica Ojeda, and Agustina Bazterrica. "This Latin American gothic is a movement that I follow because I feel that its concerns and methods are similar to mine, even though we work in completely different historical contexts."
"Cinema has forced me to think carefully about plot and narrative needs, always maintaining momentum, as in a script only the action is described, only the things that will be seen on screen," Veres points out about his relationship with the cinematic world. Music, especially underground rock and urban genres that emerged in post-communist Hungary -"I was a rock drummer when I was young," he confesses- is another very present element in many of his stories. "When writing, music leads me to ideas that defy immediate description, as it describes pure emotions or moods that flow and ebb without narrative intention," he explains. "If you try to describe your favorite music, you often find that you don't have the words because music is beyond words. I like my writing to be somewhere between these two extremes: a story that captivates you but takes you to places that defy description, that exist as a pure emotional state," he argues.
Humor, sarcastic, ironic, and dark humor is one of the keys to his literature, as he considers it linked to terror. "I don't think one can exist without the other. A man's laughter often comes at the expense of another's suffering. When a story comes to mind, I usually laugh at the absurdity of the idea. I often laugh while writing as well. Without humor, no matter how dark they are, these stories wouldn't work, as I don't write classic horror with serial killers, mutants, or demonic possession," the writer reasons. "My ideas stem from the absurdity of the human experience, and if I didn't acknowledge the humor it contains, they wouldn't work. I want my readers to laugh because laughter is an outlet through which they can release tension, something necessary for the story to have full effect. If the audience is constantly under pressure, they get tired. When they laugh, they cheer up again and can be scared once more."
A New Pair of Eyes
The formula has worked in a country where, as Veres explains, fantasy and horror literature have very little tradition. "Hungarian readers were very reluctant to genre literature with a local setting, however, I wanted to address Hungary, its history, its mundanity, its characters, its suffering, hopes, fears, and dreams. I reconstructed it based on what I knew and saw around me every day, and on the problems and anxieties my generation struggles with," he argues. This makes the country's political and social reality permeate many of the stories where, for example, the rural world is presented in a very different way than the naive countryside that prevails in Western literature.
"Hopefully, it's not as wild and brutal as in my stories," he laughs, "but depending on the area you choose, you can definitely find challenging aspects. The rural settings in my stories are a mix of reality and fantasy, but some of the most immediate aspects and mentalities come from real places and people I know. There has been a conscious political effort over the past 14 years to fuel the contrast between urban and rural areas in Hungary, and some of my stories satirize this political narrative, strike at the heart of many of our current fears, and address populist narratives in a subversive way, using fantastical methods."
According to the writer, these alternative worlds "give us a new pair of eyes with which we can see our own world. While we live day by day, we lack the historical perspective of our society. We see the world as something fixed, and only in retrospect do we recognize the changes that have occurred," Veres opines. "Dystopias can serve as tools to accelerate this vision of change, usually for the worse. I would also say they serve as a warning, but who am I kidding? What is a dystopia for one person is a utopia for another."
One of the most terrifying stories, "The Blood-Color Machine," can be read as a reminder of the authoritarian past as well as a dystopian prophecy. "The memory of the authoritarian past or a prophecy of a future dictatorship are the same thing. This story is about the apathy of the inhabitants of a city, how they allow themselves to be humiliated, ridiculed, and destroyed in exchange for the illusion of security," explains Veres. "At the time I wrote this story, Hungary had just reached a point of no return on the path to a soft dictatorship. Many of the unsettling elements of the story directly reflect the decisions of our political leaders and the narrative they use to keep the population in a state of wild fear, which is what they seek to govern by."
It is this fear that leads Veres to believe that genres like fantasy, science fiction, and horror are on the rise in the current world. "We have a clear sense of losing control. We can all see that the planet is heading towards some kind of apocalyptic scenario: politically, socially, economically, and environmentally. What can we do about it? Return plastic bottles to recycling sites while the factories that produce them destroy our planet?" he asks. "There is a widespread fear of this loss of control that creates a need for escapism; hence the success of superhero movies, where imaginary problems are addressed, or horror movies, which address this global fear on a personal level. It's no wonder that many current creations are so fascinated by the idea of mourning. We are already mourning a world that is fading away," he concludes.