Attila Veres

I was unsure how to rate this, but it's enjoyable all the way through with only 1 slight miss and I think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts even if a few stories don't fully live up to their potential so 4 it is. There's a few themes touched on repeatedly - the yearning for Something that provides meaning or just goes past the everyday, the draw of traditions and routines even when they're bad, the difficulty of fitting in, missed potential, the nihilism that can come from both success and failure, the struggle to "grow up" successfully, the specific Hungarian variations on these.

The best story is definitely Walks Among You, which is about the struggle for faith in a Lovecraftian style cult when it abandons human sacrifice, comes into the open and (mostly) tries to fit into acceptable Hungarian society. The way it depicts the desperation for certainty, longing for a miracle, desire to go back to The Old Times, the complicated issue of compromising with society... but all using an eldritch religion that devotes its life to a god who, if he cares for anything, only cares for suffering, which adds a really fun and fascinating dimension to it.… (mehr)