ADAM PORKOLAB

Genre:

Palóc folk horror / dark fantasy

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“The Turning” — accepted by JayHenge Publishing for The Midnight Menagerie at the Edge of Everywhen.

Forthcoming: date to be confirmed.

Summary:

For thirty-one years Bana Mihály has turned his bedridden mother every morning in a Palóc mining village that has bent itself around her silence. Then a horseless night fair the old women call the sergő comes up the valley, and wherever its wheel turns, every creature becomes what it was kept from being: rabbits flute, the village drunk wants only well water, and his mother rises.

Genre:

Occult detective / Holmes–Carnacki pastiche

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“The Indelible Hand” — accepted by Belanger Books for The Detective and the Ghost-Finder: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki, edited by John Linwood Grant.

Forthcoming: date to be confirmed.

Summary:

In the spring of 1902, Sherlock Holmes summons Carnacki the Ghost-Finder to Baker Street over letters a widow receives in her dead husband’s hand, down to the broken tail of his g. Holmes has already traced the forger, yet one letter reveals where a ring lay pawned for thirty years, a fact no living person knew.

Genre:

Maritime horror

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Salt Ledger” — accepted by Campfire Publishing for Savagery on the Salty Seas, Volume 1 (eds. Aaron K. Crocker and Linette Kasper).

Forthcoming: date to be confirmed.

Summary:

Three hundred years after its first crossing, the restored Santa Pertinacia retraces its eighteenth-century route across the Atlantic, until the glassy sea clamps the hull and will not let go. The ship moves again only when a crew member vanishes overboard, and the original log, found hidden in the keel, records how its captain once paid the sea for passage.

Genre:

Satirical science fiction / dystopia

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“The Thirsty One” — accepted by After Dinner Conversation.

Forthcoming: May 2027.

Summary:

In a world where work delivers chemically guaranteed happiness, one caste builds by Tuesday what the other demolishes by Wednesday, and only Chutz Paholder, diagnosed with ergophobia at three, feels nothing but thirst. When he falls for Eskew, a blissful demolition worker, and starts asking aloud what all the building is for, the state invents a caste just for him.

Genre:

Humorous science fiction

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Until Further Noise” — accepted by Utopia Science Fiction Magazine for the December 2026 issue (“Revolutions: Utopia Triumphant”).

Forthcoming: December 2026.

Summary:

When the ten-thousand-year license humanity signed for music expires, the alien Harangs bureaucracy moves to reclaim every harmonic frequency on Earth. The countdown pauses only while the audience requests and the stage responds, and the band drawn to open humanity’s last concert, before eighteen thousand people and a watching galaxy, has existed for two weeks and knows three chords.

Genre:

Hungarian folk horror / dark fantasy

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“The Egg Smith” — accepted by Owl Hollow Press for The Unopened Door anthology.

Forthcoming: October 2026.

Summary:

In a Hungarian village, the tojáskovács seals coughs, nightmares and rages into wax-drawn Easter eggs that households bury before sundown, yet one she has never buried: the spiral egg holding the Old One, kept twelve years on her pantry shelf because it is the best work she has ever done. On Easter Monday, five drunk boys carry it off from the bench by her door.

Genre:

Literary fiction (a story of memory)

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺

Publication:

„Vörös fény a hatvanason” — selected for the anthology of Egy út, millió történet, the short-story competition held by the Eötvös10 Cultural Centre and the Ex Libris Library for the 150th anniversary of Andrássy Avenue.

Out of 176 entries, the jury — Szilvia Artner, László Garaczi, Ágnes Gurubi and Endre Kukorelly — placed it among the highlighted works. The results and a reading evening with music were held on 2 September 2026 at Eötvös10.

Forthcoming: the competition anthology.

Reading:

Read by Ádám Porogi, actor of the Radnóti Miklós Theatre, at the awards evening: recording on YouTube (11:06).

The readings were staged under Radnóti Plusz, a joint programme of the Radnóti Miklós Theatre and Eötvös10. Anna Csábi, actor and director, read the pieces written from a woman’s perspective, and Kristóf Darvas accompanied and linked the readings on live piano.

Summary:

A man rides the Millennium Underground and always gets off at Oktogon, even when his business is at Bajza Street. As a child his grandfather walked him home from piano lessons along this stretch, and always stopped beneath the same building — the one with red neon letters burning on it. The grandfather never spoke about the war, and about the years that followed even less. Decades later only signs are left to the grandson: the language of official reports that slipped out of the old man’s mouth now and then; a door that could never be shut; a remembered image the calendar refuses to allow. The building is a museum today, and the story goes exactly as far as its narrator does — to the ticket desk. It begins in a family memory and ends where such memories end: without a question, without an answer.

Genre:

Palóc magical realism

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺

Publication:

“Bükkmuzsika” — second place (prose), “Muzsikál az erdő” Jókai Anna Literary Contest 2026; published in the contest’s collection of prize-winning works.

Published: July 2026.

Original publication: uj.muzsikalazerdo.hu/images/2026/07/Nyertes_alkot%C3%A1so…

Summary:

Misa Köröm rises at dawn and takes down two cups: his own, and another for the right-hand corner of the table — but by morning that cup, too, is empty. Mourning his dead neighbour, the old man withdraws to his former slaughterhouse workshop to carve an instrument out of beechwood and carry it back to the forest.

Genre:

Science fiction

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Remnant Talklock” — accepted by Soo Generis Publishing (Crewe, England) for Fade To Grey – AfterLife, a four-author collection (Soo Generis, Kera Hollow, Kelly Piner, Adam Porkolab). Contract signed 17 August 2026.

Forthcoming (announced by the publisher, not yet on sale).

Summary:

Sarume Nuvuk steps into a dead person’s flat with a grief-processing unit strapped to her shoulder. Training told her that calibration is the moment the machine learns your voice. It works the other way round.

Genre:

Satire / weird (bureaucratic satire)

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺 (an English version, I, Motor Oil Moore, also exists)

Publication:

“Én, Motorolaj Moore” — accepted for the SF&F Átjáró anthology (Tuan Kiadó), Hungarian–Romanian–Bulgarian–Serbian themed issue. Hungarian-language rights only, five years.

Forthcoming: 2027.

Summary:

For twenty-four years Billy Phuley’s name has been a protocol error: the Name Administration Service’s system cannot find it, and only his biometrics identify him. The office compels him to rename himself on a form — and so he becomes Motor Oil Moore. A satire on how an identity can be abolished by administrative means.

Genre:

Psychological science fiction

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺 (an English version, Racing My Charger, also exists)

Publication:

“Most én is versenyt futok a töltőmmel” — accepted for the GABO SFF anthology.

Summary:

A courier is carrying the monthly consignment — item 417, sixty doses of encoded grief-tea — when a short-out forces him to draw a charge from the hold’s cooling system: one sip, one convulsion, and the ship turns sixteen degrees, into the throat of an argon geyser. As he drifts he lives through the memories of dying strangers — in the world of the yeruto, who are not evil, simply incapable of feeling.

Genre:

Essay (photo analysis)

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺

Publication:

“Ó a SZÓ helyén” — awarded in the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center’s competition Képolvasás. In memoriam Gera Mihály, where it ran under the title “Énekóra”. Laudation by Emese Révész.

Photograph: unknown photographer, Énekórán (c. 1958), Gera Mihály Archive.

Published: Artmagazin Online, 19 June 2026.

Original publication: artmagazin.hu/articles/hir/kihirdettek_a_kepolvasas_in_me…

Summary:

A reading of a 1958 classroom photograph: the girl’s mouth is round as an “ó”, while the teacher’s pointer indicates “sz” on the Kodály solmisation chart — SZÓ, which is also the Hungarian for “word”. The essay opens the period out from the fact that at home the word itself is taboo — the girl’s brother was perhaps taken away for precisely that — while the school tames the dangerous “ó” into a musical note.

Genre:

Science Fiction, chamber drama / time-travel medical thriller

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Seek Medical Attention” — accepted by Mixtape Stories as an audio-drama adaptation. First publication (audio) — not a reprint; the story has not appeared in print.

Forthcoming: audio drama.

Summary:

In 2880, the operator of an Arctic transit station develops appendicitis in the middle of a century storm, with communications down and no surgeon within a thousand kilometres. So he opens the return gate and pulls a Victorian doctor out of 1882. Two men, one station AI, and a body that will not wait: a chamber drama about who a civilisation quietly classifies as expendable.

Genre:

Science Fiction, found document / bureaucratic hermit-crab

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Log of the Green-Brown Case” — accepted for the Missed-Fits anthology (Calendar of Fools).

Forthcoming: Autumn 2026.

Summary:

In the final twelve minutes before the archive launches, a lone archivist files one last artifact: a handmade, water-damaged manuscript that the classification AI has graded a D-minus and marked unfit for preservation. She takes the last storage slot in Sector 412 and overrides the system by hand. The story is told entirely as the salvage protocol she leaves behind, metadata, system alerts, appendices and all.

Genre:

Literary eco-horror / quiet horror (place-based literary fiction)

Language:

English 🇬🇧

Publication:

“Paper, Pulp, and Bone” — accepted by Terrain.org, a place-based literary journal.

Forthcoming: ~March 2027.

Summary:

An ecologist finds a paper wasp nest in her shed, built out of the box of drawings her dead son left behind. She knows exactly what the wasps are doing to the paper, and she knows what she chose to do with his body. She decides to let the nest stand. A quiet story about grief, decomposition, and which forms of return we are willing to call natural.

Status:

Award-winning – Special Prize, 2026

Language:

Hungarian 🇭🇺

Publication:

“Óda a szégyenhez” – Special Prize, “Poet of the Year 2026” Ode Competition (Lillafüred Foundation). Top 13 of 189.

Ceremony: Lillafüred Palace, April 2026.

Read it in Katafora (April 17, 2026).