Many of these stories can be classified as either ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, illustrating the separation and often antagonism between city and country life in Hungary. The urban stories feature protagonists whose obsessions intensify until a nightmarish climax is reached. Frequently they feature a background of rock or heavy metal.

In the pandemic story ‘To Bite a Dog’, a man asks his girlfriend about her various cuts and bruises. She has developed a habit of biting dogs, and this proclivity exacerbates as the story continues. In ‘The Amber Complex’ Gabor, a college dropout living with his mother, decides his natural talent, and mission, is to become an alcoholic. A surprise invitation brings him to a mysterious wine tasting within a vast, laby­rinthine cellar. The participants are not tasting wine, but something called ‘complex’. Each succeeding color-coded complex produces a hallucinogenic vision, a strategy Veres uses to great effect, transporting the characters into frightening psychological states. Only Gabor is left to taste the final, seventh drink, the Amber Complex.

The rock music-themed ‘Fogtown’ is told as a series of blog posts, book excerpts, and interview transcripts concerning an unfinished book by a man named Balázs on local rock bands that never released an album. The band Fogtown keeps popping up in these interviews, a legendary group even though almost no one saw them play. Balázs becomes obsessed with Fogtown after discovering people have disappeared, committed suicide, or experienced odd visions following exposure to the band or their music.

‘Sky Filled With Crows, Then Nothing at All’ is another rock-themed story narrated by a demon created to tell the Antichrist his true nature and purpose. The Antichrist becomes a metal musician after the demon introduces him to the scene, thinking it would facilitate his future role.

Veres makes frequent nods to Lovecraft, but his cosmic horrors are original creations evolving out of his characteristic hallucinatory imagery and religious or cultish visions of horror.

‘Walks Among You’ concerns a Lovecraftian-like religion originally banned for its use of human sacrifice. The story follows a teenage girl bullied for her faith, a pensioner who helped get the church legalized, and a man married to a church member. Set at the funeral of a woman high up in the church who died of cancer, all three are questioning their faith in the Great Old and Nameless Gods after seeing her cancer-ravaged body.

‘Multiplied by Zero’ is an extreme portrayal of a descent into Lovecraftian madness. After the narrator’s old girlfriend informs him she aborted his child (she argues that a child reduces a woman’s value to zero), he takes a guided bus trip into a dangerous and unreal land. The story is told after the fact in the form of a travel guide, with overly deadpan advice given the horrendous events described. It’s a suicidal journey for the tourists who sign up.