.png?w=3840 "Abandon by Blake Crouch Cover")
Sometimes people just fucking vanish, and nobody knows what happened to them. Sure, it’s easy (and fun!) to speculate theories. Rapture? UFO abduction? Flesh-eating fog, perhaps? The sky’s the limit. Hell, maybe the sky literally reached its limit, and sucked up everybody in its overflow.
Why people disappear isn’t very important to me. It’s the fact that they can, at all, that I find fascinating. For a person made of skin and bones and hair and organs and Internet memes and so forth to suddenly…no longer be. It’s terrifying, yes, but also weirdly exciting?
Have you never fantasized about one day disappearing from your life? Leaving everything behind and becoming a ghost?
The idea has excited me forever. Although, to be honest, I have some experience with disappearing. As a teenager, my parents lost our house, and with very little warning we moved into a hotel in another town. I was withdrawn from school and isolated from all of my friends.
One day I was a regular seventh-grade kid and then suddenly it was like I’d never existed. Once or twice a month we’d drive back to town to cash my dad’s check and I’d walk around Main Street feeling like a spirit returning to her old stomping grounds, forgotten by time.
But that was a Max disappearance, not a mass disappearance. It’s way cooler when a bunch of people disappear, imho. Less sad, more…intriguing.
So let’s discuss some books about that very topic.
The Haunting of Velkwood
This is the novel that originally inspired the idea for this article, so it feels right to start here. Gwendolyn Kiste has been releasing some of the best horror fiction I’ve had the pleasure of reading. The Rust Maidens was my introduction to her work, and I’ve been hooked ever since. 2024’s The Haunting of Velkwood might be her best yet.
Twenty years ago everybody on a single street in a neighborhood vanished, except for three friends. The incident, understandably, turned into a tabloid goldmine and endless material for amateur ghost-hunters.
The book follows one of the three survivors, who’s hired by a mysterious researcher to return to her condemned childhood street and dig up the trauma that’s forever scarred her life.
Phantoms
This feels silly to say, but I feel like Dean Koontz gets overlooked sometimes by horror readers. He’s a massively popular author, yes, totally. Obviously his work sells. But I seldom hear him getting talked about in the “horror community” circles.
I think it might be a weird loyalty thing. For whatever reason, maybe due to their proximity of each other on bookshelves, Dean Koontz and Stephen King feel like hometown rivals. The Cubs and White Sox of horror. Of course this is ridiculous, and doesn’t make much sense, but still, I swear it’s a thing.
Anyway, all of that is to say we don’t talk about Phantoms enough.
Something is vanishing people in a small town, but what? And why? What’s so fun about this book is the speculation among characters.
To quote the eternally wise Jay from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: “Word, bitch, Phantoms like a motherfucker.”
The Langoliers
Slightly before Koontz on the bookshelf you will find another horror juggernaut you may recognize by the name of Stephen King. These two authors combined will probably consist of an entire horror display at your local Barnes and Noble. If you’re lucky, and live near a location that’s embraced the spooky genre, there will be other authors besides those two.
The title we’re discussing today is a novella found in his collection Four Past Midnight. I’ve often thought King is at his best in novella form and I think “The Langoliers” is good evidence proving why I am correct (now, and forever).
The premise is simple but terrifying. A dozen or so passengers on an airplane land at an airport utterly devoid of life. It is completely empty. Or…is it?
Also highly recommended, if you can track it down: an experimental film from 2021 by Aristotelis Maragkos called The Timekeepers of Eternity, which is basically an edited and animated cut of the original 1995 miniseries. Probably my favorite King adaptation ever?
The Lost Village
Pitched as The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar, Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village follows a documentary filmmaker and her team investigating an old mining town where a mass disappearance occurred decades previously, leaving behind only two people: a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn.
The plan is to make a film about the town. However, as things tend to happen in horror novels, thing quickly take a turn and start going horribly wrong…
Abandon
Stories concerning mass disappearances love to be set in old mining towns. This isn’t something I really thought about until putting together this article, but you’ll see it over and over, including in the many other books that I cut from my final list.
The same is true for Blake Crouch’s Abandon, which focuses on an old mining town where everybody vanished on Christmas Day in 1893. Like many other stories about mass disappearances, this one also follows researchers traveling to the town with the intention of cracking its mystery.
Surprise, surprise…it does not go the way they expect.
Limetown
You probably recognize this title from the massively popular podcast created by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, which follows an American Public Radio reporter investigating the disappearance of over three hundred people from a neuroscience research facility in Tennessee.
Cote Smith’s novel, released during season two of the podcast, works as a prequel to the show.
The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta is responsible for writing the source material of some of my favorite movies (Election and Little Children), and also my favorite television show of all time: The Leftovers.
The premise is this: 2% of the world’s population vanishes. What happens next?
Meaning, the book isn’t too interested in why this Sudden Departure occurred. Instead it wants to know how the people left behind cope after such an insane, life-altering event. It’s a horrific exploration of grief and what it means to be human, and I think it rules.
But more importantly, the television show exists because this book exists. Season one covers the novel, but seasons two and three expand on the story in truly awe-inspiring ways. Season two specifically is maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.
If you haven’t read The Leftovers, go add it to your TBR.
And if you haven’t seen the show? Literally stop reading this article and go watch it right now.
In fact, let’s just call it quits here, anyway.
You have books to read and TV shows to obsess over.
