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Absence - Hardcover

Hudson, Andrew Dana

 
9781641297585: Absence
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1641297581 ISBN 13: 9781641297585
Verlag: Soho Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In this gripping, moving, and genre-blending speculative debut, the world is unraveling from an epidemic of human vanishing. Two rookie agents from the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs are dispatched to small-town Kansas to investigate a woman who claims to have returned from Spontaneous Human Absence, offering answers that could change everything.

People are “popping.” Disappearing, one by one, into thin air. A global cataclysm known as Spontaneous Human Absence. In a world where prospects for survival are increasingly grim, hopelessness prevails, political rifts widen, and doomsday predictions flourish.

Harvey Ellis works the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an ad hoc federal agency meant to contain and catalog the crisis. Harvey’s job: to investigate claims of Absence, and, if validated, issue a standard government stipend to boost morale. Still recovering from losses of his own, Harvey is content in his routine—until his life is shaken by an unexpected assignment from the central office.

A woman long thought Absent has reappeared in her hometown of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming she’s been to the other side and back. But is her wild and irresistible account true, or is she just the latest false prophet, offering hope to a world desperate for it? Together with his no-BS partner, Shonda Erins, Harvey travels to Dawnville to find out.

A resonant portrait of a world beset by confusion and dismay, Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut is a vividly imagined novel of cosmic proportions, examining life in a time of exception and the stories we tell to get by.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, teacher, and critical futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures and dozens of short stories and essays appearing in venues like Slate, Lightspeed Magazine, Long Now Ideas, and Jacobin—as well as his newsletter, www.solarshades.club. He lives in Arizona, where he teaches writing, futures thinking, and yoga.

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1

“We were sitting right here, eating dinner, like always, and she just . . .” The husband held up a closed fist and then opened it, fingers splayed wide.

“Popped?” Harvey Ellis suggested.

“Yeah, exactly,” the husband agreed. “She disappeared into thin air, no time for goodbyes, no nothing. There was just that noise you hear, then gone. God—what am I going to do?”

The husband put his head in his hands, the shock apparently starting to metastasize into grief. Apparently.

Harvey looked around. He could see into the kitchen, the TV room, and down a dim hall. All shabby; furniture covered with magazines and dishes and dust. The dining room where they stood, on the other hand, was pristine. Floors scrubbed, table set with a fresh, white cloth. Picture of husband and missing wife smiling at him from the mantel.

“Well, Mr., uh”—Harvey checked his notes—“Bartholomew. My deepest condolences on your loss. If everything checks out, I’ll get the paperwork going, so the IRS can send you your remainder benefit.”

The husband nodded, but couldn’t help but ask, voice deadpan, “Checks out?”

“Yup,” Harvey said. He pulled out a boxy, handheld device, with buttons and a little gray screen. He unspooled a cord wrapped around an oblong metallic rod, connected the two. “Soon as this beeps, I’ll finish filling out your wife’s Certificate of Absence.”

“What is that thing?” the husband said, shying away as Harvey waved the rod over the dining table.

“This here’s bleeding-edge science. Out of Sweden, I think. An Ulbay Itshay Radiation Detector, they call it.” Harvey added a flourish to his waving. “Picks up the signature left in the cosmic microwave background whenever someone pops. Makes my job a lot easier, let me tell you!”

“Oh. How long does the signature last?”

There it was: regret, metastasizing into panic.

“When did you say your wife popped?”

The husband edged toward the kitchen, trying to look confused and absentminded. Harvey edged too. “A few hours at least. But, I don’t know . . . it could have been yesterday . . . I’ve been in such a state of shock . . .”

Harvey set his gizmo down on the table.

“No beep,” he said.

There was a flurry of motion—and violence. The husband dashed into the kitchen, maybe going for a back door or a steak knife. Harvey tackled him, and they both went down, hitting the floor with a painful thump. There they struggled, half wrestling, half striking and clawing. Harvey had the height; the husband had the weight. Harvey had a little training on how to handle hostile calls without a gun. The husband had desperation, which flared but burned out fast. For a moment, they were locked in a scrabbling stalemate. Then Harvey kicked out with one leg and found purchase on the plywood cabinetry. With that leverage, he flipped the husband over and cuffed his hands behind his back.

“You really should’ve cleaned the whole house,” Harvey said, panting. “One room sparkling while the rest are trashed? Dead giveaway that you’ve cleaned up blood spatter or drag marks. I know people have a poor opinion of Depop cops, but we aren’t that stupid. So, where’d you hide her body?”

The husband thrashed in the cuffs for a minute, then gave up, rested his red face on shiny linoleum.

“Buried,” he said, sounding empty. “Out in an abandoned field, two counties over. I made her a coffin and everything.”

“Wow, that’s love right there,” Harvey said.

“She prayed for it, every day!” The husband was crying now. “She believed in a Life After, and she was sure it was heaven. But years passed, and it just wouldn’t take her. I couldn’t bear to live like that, with her just . . . waiting, letting our life fall apart because she was sure it was almost her turn.”

“So, what, you figured you’d cut to the chase?”

The husband gave an angry sob. “If she was right about where we go, I saved her a lot of waiting. If she was wrong, I spared her from . . . whatever it is.”

“Spared her, huh?” Harvey almost laughed at the sad, twisted logic. “We’ll see if the judge sees it that way. Mr. Bartholomew, you’re under arrest for murder and for filing a fraudulent claim of Absentia. Anything you say can and will, blah blah blah. I hope you find spending the remainder of your time in jail more bearable than living with your wife.”

“Fuck you!” the husband spat. “You don’t know anything!”

“I know how to recognize a graphing calculator plugged into a vibrator,” Harvey said. “That’s more than you.”

The husband made a choking sort of noise that turned into a manic laugh.

“You like what you do? Like catching people up, feeling real smart? Running around figuring out who’s gone and who’s dead? You think it matters? We’ll all be one or the other soon enough. I just wanted to live what life I had left. What you do isn’t even living. So fuck. You. Fu—”

The husband shivered, and was suddenly gone. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum he left, sounding a huffing little pop. Harvey’s cuffs clattered to the floor.

Harvey stared at the cuffs, his heart pounding. He sat down at the husband’s clean-clothed table, feeling light and heavy at the same time. After a few minutes, he opened his notebook, tore out the Provisional Certificate of Absence he’d started for the wife, began filling out a new one for the husband.

“Well, shit,” he said eventually, to the empty dining room. “What are the odds?”

But the odds, Harvey knew, were getting better all the time.

2

Harvey worked the night shift, which meant he only handled a few cases a week—for now. Not that people didn’t pop in their sleep; they did, but usually those reports didn’t come in until morning. Harvey was always surprised by how easily people slept through the disappearance of someone they shared their bed with, not waking when that warm body turned to cold emptiness between the sheets.

The cases that did ring Harvey’s phone during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift were an eclectic mix: dance partners vanishing from nightclubs, guests suddenly missing from dinner parties, other night shifters popping from behind security guard desks and convenience store counters, cars found abandoned on the highway.

“Spontaneous Human Absence” the experts called it now, or—even more euphemistically—“Gradual Depopulation,” “Depop” for short. Everyone, including Harvey, hated both terms. For one, “Depop” had cemented “pop” as distasteful but unavoidable slang for the event. For two, neither “Depop” nor “Absence” implied anything about the event itself. People wanted to be able to say that Absentees ascended or passed through or were taken—depending on their preferred religious doctrine, conspiracy theory, or headcanon fantasy. They wanted a term with some agency or directionality or finality to it. But the stats and the science couldn’t provide them that. All science was sure of was that they were Absent, and that they popped.

Worse, the terminology was agnostic as to cause or result or anything beyond the change in the total population. “Cause” meaning the...

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Verlag
Soho Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1641297581
ISBN 13 
9781641297585
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Soho Press
https://sohopress.com/the-best-of-soho-press-2021/

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