ABSENCE

Two government agents head to the American heartland to investigate a resurrection.

Hudson brings refreshing common sense and keen intelligence to this fantastical tale about the afterlife and what its proximity can do to a community’s sanity. In this grim near future, human beings have begun spontaneously “popping” out of existence, Rapture-style, with no warning and no predictability. Much like Ben Winters in his Last Policeman series of existential detective novels, Hudson eschews spectacle for the cold comfort of figuring out how people behave at the end of the world, while casually offering startling evidence of how society has changed, from loosened sexual mores to self-driving cars. Mostly, it’s a slow, sad apocalypse drifting toward human extinction. It’s no wonder Harvey Ellis is a bit of a sad sack, working the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs and mourning his long-absent fiancée. Far from being elite agents, he and his colleagues are more like civil servants, assigned to verify Absences and hand out government stipends. But when a woman long believed “popped” suddenly reappears in the small town of Dawnville, Kansas, Harvey and his skeptical partner, Shonda Erins, are sent out to get her story straight. Long after her childhood disappearance from a school talent show, Gabby Reyes claims to have returned from wherever it is people have been going, despite a disheartening lack of biometric evidence. She spins a wild story of materializing in a transitional interdimensional community dubbed “Strangertown,” from which she managed to make her metaphysical way home. A story with impossible-to-fill holes gets even more tangled when Shonda discovers a missing investigator with a striking similarity to their suspect. Now, what happens when the structures that underpin human belief are presented with a real mystery? That’s the real question, even if the answer isn’t entirely unexpected.

A haunted story about unfinished lives, the persistence of hope, and the consequences of grief without end.