Harare Review of Books

448 pp. May 5, 2026, Soho Press. Speculative fiction.

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Remember that feeling of people disappearing around you? How death suddenly became disconcertingly common, and you wondered when it would be your turn? Because people you were talking to last week—so vivacious, so present—would suddenly, disorientatingly be gone… And your loudest, most online friends would tweet that they were having trouble breathing, and then would never tweet again? 

This is a pandemic novel. Absence will remind you of those feelings above as you read it, and you may wonder—if perhaps you did in 2020, and definitely encouraged here to some degree by Hudson—if that’s what the Christian Rapture might feel like. In Hudson’s novel, people pop out of existence—become capital A Absent—with an audible sound, which may be the only thing to confirm the event to you when you’re among strangers. Because it’s hard to make sense of these disappearances: How is a person here, and then just … not? Even when you see it with your own eyes, it makes no sense (at least not to the people of the novel). 

Absence is happening worldwide, although the setting here is Kansas—a rural small town where everyone knows everyone, and where the community once prided itself on being Safe from Absences. In the present, agents from the Bureau of Depopulation (DePop, heh) Affairs have been sent to investigate what may be a world first: a Return, because a woman claims she “popped” and has come back. Is she lying, deluded, or is there some other rational explanation? 

But, again, this is a pandemic novel; so, it’s about the fear that attends the disappearance and possible death of loved ones, particularly because here it’s unexplained; it’s the terror and panic of wondering when it will happen to you, not if; and it’s wondering what comes after, if anything. Perhaps this Returned woman has answers. 

If this woman is a true Return, the government wants to know all about it and manage it—because can you even imagine? If word gets out, it’ll be an impossible situation to handle—not when cults (New Religious Movements, or NRMs, in the book’s terminology) are mushrooming everywhere. No one else has ever come back to tell people about the After Life. And if she’s lying or deluded, the she can’t be given access to a public platform.

Absence is a police procedural at the end of the world, reminiscent of Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman in that way (which is a must-read, along with the other two books in the trilogy). It’s is written from the POV of one of the two DePop agents: Harvey’s lost people of his own, of course, almost everyone has, and he therefore finds it impossible to be unbiased or neutral while he investigates this case. 

Meanwhile, life around the world goes on in some ways but also doesn’t, not with the great mystery hanging over everyone. So people do what people do: they join cults or form communes, loot the property of the Absent and generally cause trouble, look for answers, or believe conspiracy theories, or just stay in denial. Hudson either explores those things explicitly in the novel as part of the plot, or allows them to form the background.

While I thought the novel could have been shorter—Hudson tends to over-explain some things, at the cost of pacing and the novel’s action—I could not stop reading. The Returned woman is a great mystery that Hudson manages to sustain right up to the end of the novel. The book’s MC, Harvey, is engagingly complex and very human, easy to identify with as he grapples with memories, emotions, loneliness, and hope. And while we’re all still processing pandemic losses, Absencefeels quite close to home.

Absence is thoughtful, engrossing, and hugely satisfying, regardless of—or possibly because if?—its unexpected ending (and its many nicely done twists). Highly recommended.

Thanks to Soho Press and NetGalley for DRC access.

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