What could be more destabilizing—or trail more fascinating narrative threads—than a person vanishing without a trace? It’s no mystery why countless authors kick off their books with people gone missing. Marry this trope with speculative fiction, and you’ve got stories whose possibilities are literally limitless.
In my new book, The Bad Ones, four people vanish from around a wintry suburb in a single night. The best friend of one of the lost learns that a slumber party game centered around a figure of local lore is key in unlocking the mystery. Here are six more supernatural and horror-inflected stories in which vanishings drive the plot.
Knock Knock, Open Wide, by Neil Sharpson
Twenty years ago college girl Etain left a party in the middle of the night, driving alone into the wilds of rural Ireland. She was found days later, forever changed by the nightmare she survived. What happened to her colors her entire future and that of her husband and daughters—one who vanished in childhood, the other, Ashling, marked by her toxic relationship with an alcoholic mother who can hardly bear to look at her since her other child vanished. But Ashling knows what no one will ever believe: her sister’s disappearance has everything to do with a local children’s television show and a box on set that must never be opened, containing the wicked entity that took her sister away. This is a family horror story threaded through with cult activity and terrifying Celtic mythology, its mysteries revealed with tantalizing precision.
House of Hollow, by Krystal Sutherland
Once upon a time three small sisters disappeared beneath their parents’ gaze, seemingly into thin air. When the trio returned a month later, they were dreadfully altered: hair paled, throats scarred, all their lost baby teeth restored. Worst of all is their ability to mesmerize those around them, whether they want to or not. In the decade since, eldest sister Grey Hollow has become an iconic and elusive fashion designer of darkly dreamlike clothes. When she disappears, youngest sister Iris—the one least comfortable with their strangeness—sets out to find her with the help of wild middle sister Vivi and Grey’s model boyfriend. Their haunted journey takes them through a darkly enchanted London and into even stranger places beyond.
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings
Giddings creates an insidiously plausible world in which witchcraft is real and highly regulated, used as a lever to control women utterly: requiring all women to submit to marriage to a man or the sponsorship of a male relative by age thirty, in order to be eligible for freedoms as basic as employment. When Josephine was a teen her mother vanished, tainting her daughter by association; fourteen years later, she’s presumed dead. Now twenty-eight, Josephine is feeling increasing pressure to marry when a version of her mother’s will is found that leaves her a large bequest—but in order to claim it, she must visit an island that only appears once every seven years. There, she may find all she has been seeking and more. I was especially gripped by Giddings’ descriptions of the museum where Josephine works, full of dreamlike, vividly imagined art created by witches.
The Return, by Rachel Harrison
Four women gather for a girls’ trip in a super-hip, highly secluded inn to celebrate the mysterious return of one of their number: Julie, back after two years gone, without any apparent memory of where she has been. Things are a little awkward—they haven’t been together in a long time, their friendship dynamics are uneven. Not to mention the fact that Julie is skinny and stinking and craving raw meat. Fresh meat. Things degrade from there in a disgusting fashion, featuring Harrison’s usual excellent character building and funny, sharp dialogue. This is a friendship story to soothe your ego if you’ve ever lived through a less than perfect reunion.
White Horse, by Erika T. Wurth
Kari is an urban Native who lives a small life of well-worn pleasures: Stephen King, heavy metal, hanging out with her cousin, Debby—when she’s able to escape her needy and manipulative husband—and regular visits to local bar White Horse. She has long believed her mother left her and her father when she was just a kid. But when touching a bracelet that belonged to her mother makes her experience visions of her young mother in obvious pain, she’s forced to reexamine what she’s been told about her own past. Dogged by persistent visions, Kari sets off on a literal and figurative journey to finally face the demons that dog her.
Shark Heart, by Emily Habeck
This book doesn’t exactly hit the brief, yet the disappearance on which it centers may be the most haunting on this list: the vanishing in plain sight of newlywed Wren’s beloved husband, whose humanity and physical body are slowly mutating into the rageful simplicity and terrifying form of a great white shark. Habeck’s debut is set in a world that looks like ours, with one mind-bending difference: humans can be stricken with a whole array of transformative animal mutations, changing them into creatures ranging from deep-sea predators to birds. Behind the seeming bombast of the premise—man turns into shark!—is a gorgeous, tender, and heart-wrenching tale, focused less on the fantastical than it is on Wren: a woman who has already watched her mother disappear into the fog of mental illness, and must now discover again who she in the wake of losing the person she loves most. An absolute stunner of a book.
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