Reviews: Absence and The Heart of the Nhaga at Locus

My June 2026 Locus column had a bit of an informal theme of considering the influence—acknowledged and unacknowledged—on the works under review. Plastic, Prism, Void, which I discussed earlier this month, was reviewed though the lens of how it fit—and defied—the category of romantasy. My two other reviews, both published online in the last week, are of works that seem to draw inspiration from more specific sources.

Andrew Dana Hudson's debut Absence feels like a mashup of The X-Files, The Leftovers, and the MCU's "blip" arc. It imagines a world in which people disappear at random and with no apparent explanation, and follows two government agents who travel to a small town to investigate a woman who claims to be the first person to have returned from such a disappearance. Hudson takes these inspirations and makes them his own, but he also uses their fusion to craft a touching reflection on the recent pandemic and how it affected both institutions and indivisuals.

As much as it seems inspired by the fiction of the last decade, these passages also reveal Absence as a pandemic novel, one that draws on images we all remember of the resentful, oppositional reac­tion to government restrictions on movement and behavior. There are some deliberate reversals in the novel’s imagined situation – when Harvey sees a person wearing a mask, he has a reflexive reaction of resentment towards an act he views as a refusal to participate in the societal project of tracking Absence – but nevertheless the refer­ence is clear.

As Harvey gradually comes to understand, however, the purpose of his job is less to un­derstand Absence – much less the possibility of Return – as to provide a logical framework for an inherently illogical, inescapable reality. This realization comes just as that framework begins to break down, under the pressure of Gabriela's putative Return and the boiling over of Dawnville's resentment towards her and the Bureau. The second half of the novel is spent in a sequence of pulse-pounding escapes, con­frontations, and reversals, as Harvey, Shonda, and Gabriela try to stay alive, and in control of their own fate. [read the review]

Lee Young-do's The Heart of the Nhaga (translated by Anton Hur) is the first in a four-volume epic fantasy series whose English-language promotional materials herald it as the Korean answer to The Lord of the Rings. Approaching the novel, I wasn't sure whether this was hype aimed at an anglophone audience, or a reflection of a genuine source of inspiration. The novel itself seemed determined to keep me guessing. At every turn it is both familiar and extremely strange, in a way that I found quite delightful.

The chief pleasure of The Heart of the Nhaga is how it combines the familiar structure and conventions of an epic fantasy with worldbuilding details that to a Western reader feel entirely alien. Lee draws on Korean legends in his worldbuild­ing (nhaga and tokkebi are both creatures out of Asian folklore, for example) but for a reader who is not familiar with these sources, the mixture of these strange ideas and a familiar structure creates something rich and constantly surprising. The novel ends with many unanswered questions, and it is only to be hoped that anglophone readers will not have to wait long before being allowed to learn the answers. [read the review]

That's it for my Locus reviews online at the moment, but print readers should have several more in their inbox when the August issue hits.

To subscribe to posts on Asking the Wrong Questions, use the RSS feed, or sign up for email notifications at follow.it