Tom Sweterlitsch’s 2018 novel, The Gone World, is a complex blend of science fiction thriller, detective noir, and cosmic horror. Set in 1997, the story follows Shannon Moss, a special agent for a secret division of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Moss is assigned to a brutal triple homicide case in western Pennsylvania involving the family of a Navy SEAL who has disappeared, leaving his teenage daughter missing. Her investigation reveals that the SEAL was part of a covert program that utilizes time travel, and Moss must use her own ability to travel to possible futures, or “inadmissible future trajectories” (IFTs), to find clues. As she navigates shifting timelines, she uncovers a conspiracy connected to the Terminus, a cataclysmic event that marks the end of humanity.

The novel explores themes of The Tension Between Fate and Free Will, Trauma as an Inescapable Reality, and Human Cruelty in the Face of Extinction, grounding its high-concept science fiction in a grim, procedural narrative. The Gone World is Sweterlitsch’s second novel, following his debut, Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2014), which similarly combines crime fiction with speculative elements. The book received critical acclaim upon its release, and it was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR and The A.V. Club. Director Neill Blomkamp, known for films such as District 9, was announced to be developing a film adaptation for 20th Century Studios.

This guide refers to the 2019 G. P. Putnam’s Sons trade paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source text and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, child death, death by suicide, racism, substance use, sexual content, physical abuse, illness, and cursing.

Plot Summary

During a routine training exercise, Special Agent Shannon Moss of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) travels through time and space to a distant future. As she explores, she gets lost and disoriented and sees her own future body crucified upside down—a sign of a human extinction event called the Terminus. Moss is rescued by a Navy lander and wakes on a ship headed back to her own time, suffering from frostbite and a gangrenous leg that needs to be amputated at the thigh.

In 1997, Moss is called to a triple homicide in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, at the former home of her murdered childhood friend, Courtney Gimm. The victims are the wife and two young children of Navy SEAL Patrick Mursult, whose teenage daughter, Marian, is missing. Assessing the crime scene, Moss notes that the victims’ fingernails and toenails have been removed. FBI Special Agent in Charge William Brock briefs Moss on Mursult’s involvement in a top-secret program, “Deep Waters,” which involves travel through time and space. Moss learns that Mursult, the primary suspect, is officially listed as Missing in Action, part of the crew of the USS Libra, a ship lost years ago.

The investigation leads Moss and FBI agent Philip Nestor to the macabre West Virginia home of Elric Fleece, a friend of Mursult’s and fellow crew member of the USS Libra. They find Fleece on his property, dead by suicide, hanged from a tree made of bones in a mirrored room. His home is filled with sculptures of crucified deer, reminiscent of the “hanged men”-like the version of herself Moss witnessed in the Terminus. They discover Mursult was staying with Fleece and find a clue: A photo collage inscribed with a reference to Naglfar, a mythical ship made of nails. The case takes another turn when Moss tracks Mursult to a cabin at the Blackwater Falls Lodge, only to find him executed. Realizing the case’s complexity is tied to Naval Space Command secrets, Moss’s supervisor, O’Connor, orders her to travel to an Inadmissible Future Trajectory (IFT)—a possible future—to gather intelligence.

Moss travels 19 years into a 2015 IFT and meets with an aged physicist, Dr. Njoku, who provides a cold case file. She learns that Marian Mursult’s remains were discovered in the Blackwater Gorge in 2004, and the official narrative of Patrick Mursult’s death issued to the public was a murder-suicide cover-up. The woman from explicit Polaroids she and Nestor found at Fleece’s house is identified as Nicole Onyongo, a nurse with whom Mursult was having an affair. Moss is also devastated to learn of a terrorist attack in 1998 on the CJIS facility, her workplace, which killed over a thousand people, including Brock’s wife and two daughters. Moss decides to find the future versions of Nicole and Nestor to learn more. She befriends Nicole at a bar called the May’rz Inn, using the alias of her dead friend, Courtney Gimm. She finds Nestor has left the FBI and now sells Nazi memorabilia. He takes her to the remote spot in the woods where Marian’s body was found, a site marked by mysterious stone stacks called cairns. Moss and Nestor begin a brief, intense affair, during which he reveals a deep spiritual crisis and hints at a use of force incident that left him traumatized and ended his FBI career.

The investigation in the future timeline intensifies when a Nicole confesses to Moss that Patrick Mursult was murdered by friends of her abusive husband, Jared Bietak. She names the killers as Charles Cobb and their leader, Karl Hyldekrugger. Moss realizes all these men were crewmembers on the lost USS Libra. She accompanies Nicole to a memorial for Jared, where she meets Cobb and his girlfriend, Shauna. Shauna reveals she is an undercover FBI agent and warns Moss that her cover is blown and Hyldekrugger’s crew plans to kill her. 

As Moss tries to escape, Cobb attacks her in an orchard, and she’s forced to kill him with his own knife. Shauna’s FBI partners, Egan and Zwerger, extract Moss, but they are intercepted by the future Brock, who has been driven mad by grief. Brock murders the two agents, believing Moss can take him back to 1997 to see his family and prevent their death. Moss confirms she can prevent the CJIS bombing in her own time, but that Brock will only be an echo—a duplicate from another timeline—which will cause confusion and hurt to his family if she takes him with her. Hearing this, Brock dies by suicide. 

Back in her own time, Moss briefs O’Connor and provides the current Brock with the names of the Libra crew. She also warns him of the impending CJIS bombing, identifying FBI employee Ryan Wrigley Torgersen as the man who will carry out the attack. Shannon’s lead about the cairns used to mark the spot where Marian’s body was buried in the previous IFT leads authorities to a house in Buckhannon, West Virginia, which is a chemical weapons lab for Hyldekrugger’s terrorist cell. A firefight ensues in which Jared Bietak is killed; Cobb and Hyldekrugger escape. Inside a Ryder truck in the barn, investigators find the bodies of numerous victims, including Marian Mursult, who were used by Hyldekrugger’s group as test subjects for chemical warfare. 

Later, a second, living Marian is found alive but suffering from severe hypothermia in the Blackwater Gorge. Moss interviews the echo of Marian, who describes being taken by Fleece into a thin space—a space-time knot where the boundaries between the two become tangled up and blurred—called the Vardogger, where she saw herself tied to a tree. The echo Marian escaped because she was tied with twine, while the original was bound with wire. The case unravels further when one of the bodies from the Ryder truck is identified as an echo of Ryan Torgersen, the CJIS bomber, who is still alive and at work in 1997. When Moss and Brock confront the living Torgersen, his wife reveals he is a traumatized echo, forced by Hyldekrugger to witness her murder in another timeline as a threat. Torgersen then detonates a suicide bomb, killing himself, his wife, and Brock.

Reeling from Brock’s death, Moss undertakes a second IFT mission to find Hyldekrugger. In this new 2015, the Terminus is only a year away, and Naval Space Command has been disbanded. An AI simulation of Dr. Peter Driscoll, a scientist working to cure cancer using technology harvested from IFTs, contacts her and reveals that Hyldekrugger is systematically assassinating anyone involved in research that could lead to the rediscovery of Esperance, the alien planet that is the source of the Terminus. Moss contacts Nestor and has him arrange a meeting with FBI agent Vivian Lincoln to uncover additional information about Driscoll. 

When Moss sees Vivian, she recognizes her as Shauna, the undercover agent who helped her escape Hyldekrugger in a previous IFT. Vivian, who was deep undercover investigating Hyldekrugger’s group, was given a tattoo that his followers told her serves as a map to the Gate. Moss realizes that the gate is the Vardogger tree and leads Nestor and Vivian to the location. When they arrive, Nestor, who’s revealed to be a follower of Hyldekrugger, betrays her, murdering Vivian and turning Moss over to Hyldekrugger’s men. Cobb arrives and brutally beats Moss, but Hyldekrugger intervenes. He explains he is trying to “break the chain” (304) of causality by destroying NSC’s ability to find Esperance, thus preventing the Terminus. He leads Moss through the Vardogger, a gateway into a Terminus-state pocket dimension where the wrecked USS Libra is trapped in a time loop of its own destruction.

Inside the looping shipwreck, Moss is freed from a cell by an echo of Nicole, who’s returning the kindness an echo of Moss showed her in another IFT. Nicole explains that Libra’s damaged Brandt-Lomonaco drive is causing the time loop and creating the Vardogger’s branching paths. She says the only way to stop Hyldekrugger and prevent the Terminus is to help the ship’s commander, Elizabeth Remarque, complete her original plan: to trigger a “cascade failure” in the B-L drive. This will create a black hole, erase the Libra from existence, and reset the primary timeline to the moment before the ship’s launch in 1985. During a chaotic firefight between Remarque’s loyalists and Hyldekrugger’s mutineers, Remarque manages to initiate the cascade failure just before Hyldekrugger kills her. The nascent black hole consumes the ship, the loop, and Moss herself, wiping the corrupted timeline from existence.

The timeline resets to January 1986. A teenage Shannon Moss is best friends with Courtney Gimm, who is alive, bearing only a scar on her neck from an attack that, in this reality, she survived. Moss is in a relationship with Courtney’s brother, Davy, and discovers she is pregnant with his child. The world is peaceful and ordinary, free from the shadow of the Terminus. As snow falls outside her friend’s window, she imagines a future with Davy and her child, her life now on a completely different, hopeful path, the cycle of violence and cosmic dread broken.