About
M. Laszlo is the pseudonym of a reclusive author living in Bath, Ohio. According to rumor, he based the pen name on the name of the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo.
M. Laszlo has lived and worked all over the world, and he has kept exhaustive journals and idea books corresponding to each location and post.
It is said that the maniacal habit began in childhood during summer vacations—when his family began renting out Robert Lowell’s family home in Castine, Maine. Rumor has it he still possesses those childhood diaries and plans to release a trilogy set in the Pine Tree State.
The habit continued into the 1980s when he lived in London, England (the summer of 1985.) The idea books and journals from that summer inspired his first work The Phantom Glare of Day published by the hybrid Spark Press in 2022.
The habit continued into the 1990s when he lived in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and worked as a night clerk in a Palestinian youth hostel. In recent years, he revisited that very journal/idea book and based Anastasia’s Midnight Song and The Nameless Land on the characters, topics, and themes contained within the writings.
At the end of the decade, M. Laszlo attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and earned an M.F.A degree in poetry. During his time in New York, he kept the idea books and journals that formed the basis of his second release, On the Threshold, published by the acclaimed Australian hybrid now known as Alkira. That house released Anastasia’s Midnight Song on 17 January 2025. The Nameless Land serves as a stand-alone sequel and releases on 5 December 2025.
M. Laszlo’s political parable, Rübezahl, has been described as Animal Farm meets Alice in Wonderland and is set to be published by Alkira in May 2026. The book follows from idea books he kept while working as an archivist at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.
M. Laszlo has lived and worked in New York City, East Jerusalem, and several other cities around the world. While living in the Middle East, he worked for Harvard University’s Semitic Museum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
Featured Work
Rübezahl
The Bohemian city of Iluze is under siege, and there are but two people who understand that the fiendish source of the problem is Rübezahl. The winged old man has lived in captivity in the garret of Professor Kašpar's townhome for decades. When Waltraud Schlüsselblume, a beautiful seventeen-year-old gifted with telemetry and enslaved as a child by Rübezahl, hears his cries and exhortations for release, she is puzzled to discover that only she can hear him. Her refusal to assist Rübezahl's escape results in the monster's revenge: a spell cast over the city in the form of rain, hallucinations, and a strange apathy. Even worse, Rübezahl exacts personal torment for Waltraud by entering her body and mind at critical junctures.
The situation is made worse for Waltraud and the citizens of Iluze as journalists fall in line to protect the paranormal abuser and his wishes. As Waltraud comes of age and struggles to find the weapon that the now-impaired professor used to capture Rübezahl, she must make peace with her dysfunctional childhood, the shocking new loss of her stepparents, and her shadow self. This is not an easy task while navigating an exterior world fueled by nineteenth-century morals and misogyny, gaslighting politicians and journalists, and the spirits unleashed by Waltraud's mind and the minds of others.
A former poetry grad student, Laszlo uses his wordcraft to cast quite a spell in this multilayered dark fantasy. The lyrical prose adds extra atmosphere to the haunting, ethereal tale. The plot melds imaginative worldbuilding and philosophical political underpinnings, with implications recognizable to contemporary readers: class and political conflict amid an ever-shifting reality where fact is difficult to discern from projected fiction. This dreamlike tale blooms on the first page and mesmerizes with ever-increasing tension, culminating in an unexpected conclusion.
