THE CABIN ON SOUDER HILL

An Atlanta woman who reports her husband missing from the cabin they’re sharing in the Georgia woods doesn’t realize that his disappearance will rapidly become the most normal-seeming event in her life.

Michelle Stage has only recently forgiven her husband, Cliff, a used-car dealer, for his adultery. When he leaves their isolated cabin to track down the source of a mysterious light and then doesn't return, Sheriff Louden Fisk assures her that no one else has lived anywhere close by ever since the vanishing of realtor Pink Souder, who built the cabin, and his mother, Wiccan priestess Mattie Souder, years ago. Before Michelle even has time to shift from worrying to grieving, Cliff turns up minus a finger he claims to have lost in the car crash that claimed their teenage daughter, Cassie, who Michelle just knows isn’t dead. But since Fisk and Deputy Elmer Bogan claim that Michelle’s the one who was reported missing and that they’ve never met her before, she doesn’t really know what she knows. Under the circumstances, it’s logical, if not exactly reasonable, that soon after she steals a car and a gun from her older sister, Darcy, Michelle meets Pink Souder, and then his mother, who, during a visit to the hospital where Michelle’s been taken, miraculously identifies the Jane Doe who’s sharing a room with her, a woman who’s soon reported dead herself. Different readers will decide at different points that there’s never going to be a rational explanation for all the different realities that hover around the cabin on Souder Hill, but Busch keeps the mysterious atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife—not that that would have any lasting effect.

More questions than answers. Lots more.