When I took my first look at the cover of “Absence” by Andrew Dana Hudson, several possible topics regarding the one-word title came to mind. Hmm, I thought. I wonder what kind of absence he’s talking about. Maybe it’s about a messed-up kid who always skips school. Maybe it’s about a person who always manages to not be there when scary or difficult situations arise. But I could have taken a hundred guesses, and none would be anywhere near author Hudson’s perspective on or exploration of the subject. The plots, the themes, the narration, and the dialogue all deal with the horror and mystery of how every person on earth would deal with the reality that strikes the people of this novel. That is: Individuals or groups of people suddenly disappear, without warning, without reason, without logic, without explanation. They are here and then they are not. They simply pop away. The event becomes known as popping. Two people are talking or driving together or making love, and suddenly only one is there, the other temporarily replaced by a vacuum, which itself disappears almost immediately. A popping sound is always heard when the victim goes away.

In the novel, when popping had first begun in a few locations around the world, people generally denied it was happening or simply ignored the phenomenon. But then the pops increased dramatically and quickly, and nobody could figure out what was happening — no scientists, no governments, no magicians, no geniuses. And it soon became quite clear that the entire human race was on its way to extinction. No explanation, no pattern, no design, no plan, no excuses, no help. Only sadness, despair, loneliness, helplessness, conflict, violence, hatred, inevitability, horror. The world was ending, and there was absolutely nothing any human being could do about it.

The U.S. government tried desperately to at least ease the suffering of survivors. It created the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, and the entire nickname of the organization and its raison d’etre became Depop. “Pop” now had two meanings, both of which were ugly and depressing: “Pop” was the word for the “act” of disappearing, and it was also the major element of the word “Depop,” meaning the gradual erosion of the population of the world. In any case, the government decided to send checks to the closest survivors of those who had popped, calling the new policy the Final Deal.

So we arrive at the basic plots of the novel. The protagonist is Harvey Ellis, a pretty smart, very thoughtful, sensitive, and tortured youngish man. He has lost his parents and his beloved fiancée, Kayla, to Depop. He has seen his loved ones all happily go to church together, and it is there that tragedy strikes in the form of a cluster pop. Many folks are taken, including all those Harvey has loved.

He eventually decides to go to work at the Kansas City Bureau, where he is an investigator whose job is to determine if individuals who are in some way connected to an incident of Depop are honest or fraudulent. Some, for example, run away because they just want to leave their present life for any reason, including, for example, their possible desire to escape punishment for a crime they have committed. Harvey’s job is to track them down and record their fraudulent claims of popping. He also tracks down and records those folks who have fraudulently claimed that their spouse, relative, or friend has popped. They are the ones who want to get the Final Deal checks. As Harvey proceeds with those individual investigations, he interviews the person in question to determine whether the claim is valid or just a greedy hoax. He brings along with him a machine he has invented, and he tells the interviewee that the machine can determine if the pop has taken place when and where the claimant says. When he turns the machine on, he tells the individual that it shows no sign of a recent pop. The hoaxer then gets very nervous and eventually confesses that he or she made up the story. That person will then be arrested for his fraudulent claim. Harvey calls his fake machine the Ulbay Itshay Radiation Detector, and it works almost every time. It unmasks the liar.

After about ten years of being very successful at his job, he is called into his boss’s office and offered a new kind of job, a new and very different kind of mission, this one far more dangerous and mysterious than any he has done so far. In this case, he will be assigned the job of interviewing and investigating a young woman from a small Kansas town called Dawnville. She claims that she is a Return; that she had popped but has now returned to this life on earth. Some few had made the same claim before but had been quickly proven to be phonies with phony stories. A true Return would be among the most powerful and beloved people who ever lived. She would be idolized; she would be the one who represents proof to the world that a pop is not the end, that a loved one who has popped can come back to our world, back into our lives.

Harvey accepts the mission. But he can’t be allowed to travel by himself — if he pops while on the mission, there must be a witness. Otherwise, there will be no evidence that he has actually popped. He chooses his partner, a young Black woman who is strong, wise, skeptical by nature, and, to Harvey especially, very beautiful. Her name is Shonda Erins, and she is a second character who is essential to the plot, almost a second protagonist. The two are now co-investigators.

When they arrive in Dawnville, they find their target, a young woman named Gabriela Reyes, in a holding cell in the town’s jailhouse. The sheriff explains that she had shown up the day before in a very confused state. She didn’t seem to know who she was or why she was there. But by the next day, everything had come back to her. She was, she said, a Return. She had been to the places people go when they pop, and then she returned to her life on earth. When the townspeople hear of her return, they quickly learn that she claims to be the girl who had been the first person who popped in the town. If she is telling the truth, they despise her. Before her disappearance, the town had considered itself an official Safe zone. No one, they proclaimed, had ever popped there. People from all over the Midwest had moved there, and the town had flourished. If someone suddenly disappeared, they made excuses: That person ran away after committing some crime. The family didn’t like it there. The person was simply disliked and didn’t want to stay there. He did not like the rural feeling there. She had no friends. But when Gabby Reyes popped, there were no more excuses. Everybody assumed that the pop was real. And they hated her for ruining their town’s reputation. And now, here she was again.

Gabriela is the third near-protagonist in the novel. In fact, after she is introduced to the town, the investigators, and the readers, she is the novel’s central force. Everything in the rest of the story revolves around her. She claims very stubbornly, almost religiously, that she is, in fact, the teen-aged Gabby Reyes who popped ten years ago. And when Harvey and Shonda investigate her to try to catch her in a lie or a mistake, she responds with devastating details about her travels to and through other difficult and harsh destinations and universes until she finally reached the relatively beautiful city of Strangertown, which has been granted that name as it developed through the centuries of its existence, not because it’s a strange place, but because everyone who has arrived and settled there is a stranger to everyone already there. But everyone who has lived there has been determined to build a beautiful and productive community, and they have accomplished many of their goals. Strangertown seems to be the Depop version of something much like the Christian concept of heaven, but not quite as near perfection.

Gabriela also explains that popping is not a one-time phenomenon. With practice, she says, people can learn to pop from location to location until they reach their hoped-for destination — usually Strangertown. But after living, striving, contributing and thriving there, she has decided to attempt to conquer the conveyance, the path back to her earthly home, in order to teach human beings the realities of popping, the need to work together and build and grow together, in order to save humanity and to use Depop to gain the ability to pop on command so that everyone can use the techniques she has learned, not only to save human lives but also to send more people to Strangertown to make that community even stronger and more wonderful for eternity.

Harvey is impressed with Gabriela’s presentation. He thinks there’s a possibility that she’s the real deal. Shonda thinks she’s a phony. Period. For the duration of their two-week mission, they argue, they fall in and out of love, and they live through the terrors of dealing with the people of Dawnville. Various groups of townspeople hate Gabriela, despise the two federal agents, abhor the government, or hate everybody who, they say, has ruined their precious town — once a Safe zone. And it’s no wonder they’re angry. Since the arrival of Gabriela, Harvey, and Shonda, more and more pops have been attacking the town. There are individual pops, cluster pops, and finally, during a huge funeral to honor those who have been taken, a mass cluster pop that takes tens of lives. The people lose their minds. They try to attack the three strangers. The groups of people with different views attack each other. Violence turns into madness. And Gabriela, Harvey, and Shonda barely escape with their lives.

Meanwhile, by the end of the mission, Harvey has met not only angry, despairing, and stubborn folks, but also a couple of groups of people who have maintained a sense of hope and consistent decency. And they give him a bit of hope that there might be some kind of future. Just a bit. Also meanwhile, during the mission, nothing has happened to change either Harvey’s or Shonda’s mind about Gabriela’s story. Along the way, there have been spikes of evidence that seem to prove that Gabriela is, indeed, a fraud. But then, counter-evidence arises that seems to persuade Harvey, at least, that there is a decent possibility that Gabriela is truly the woman who was the teen-aged Gabby Reyes, who popped and then Returned. Other possibilities are that a former Bureau employee quit, studied all the Bureau’s files, and then decided to “pop” into Dawnville, pretending to be the world’s first Return. Still another position is that Gabby never popped at all. She simply ran away one night, stayed away for ten years, then decided to go back with a made-up story about her experiences as a Depop veteran and survivor.

The Bureau accepts Shonda”s conclusions, rejecting all of Harvey’s ideas and hopes. Harvey accepts the Bureau’s decision. He’s not terribly angry, but he is terribly exhausted. After some more time at the bureau, he retires and decides to investigate the case again, this time on his own. He feels that he’s lost a round but hasn’t lost the fight, the fight to prove that Gariela’s story is the true story, or at least to find real proof one way or the other. One part of his new investigation involves a return to Dawnville and environs.

And farther than that, I shall not proceed, lest I spoil the ending. I must admit that about three-quarters of the way through the novel, I began to wonder how the author might be able to end the whole darn thing. Some kind of very sad ending? Some kind of happily ever after? Impossible! What kind of compromise could he possibly create? Was Shonda right or was Harvey right? Or will we be left hanging? But, I thought, that would be no ending at all. I also must admit that the novel drew me in both intellectually and emotionally. I seriously began to question myself. How would I react to the Depop? I still don’t know, but I’ve thought about it a lot. Happily, Hudson’s ending, for me, anyway, was profoundly satisfying, brilliantly conceived. Any reader who loves thought-provoking novels should read “Absence.” I daresay, it is, in fact a must-read. And you must read it before you pop.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.