Unmissing

Recent criticism frames “domestic noir” as crime stories centered on women and domestic settings. Anna Snoekstra defines the form as giving “ordinary wives and homemakers [an outlet for] becoming pre-emptive detectives, investigating their own potential victimhood” (Snoekstra, Anna. “From Bluebeard to Gone Girl: Why I’m Proud to Be Part of the ‘Domestic Noir’ Comeback.” The Guardian, 2016). This resurgence emphasizes female empowerment, marital secrecy, and the prevalence of domestic and sexual violence within intimate spaces.

Unmissing operates squarely in this mode: two wives, Merritt and Lydia, narrate their experiences as survivors, investigators, plotters, and justice-seekers in the first person, while shifting testimonies and unreliable narration keep the truth unstable. The novel uses domestic settings—nurseries, kitchens, and the marital bed—as stages for suspicion, manipulation, and murder. The home becomes both a sanctuary and trap.

Domestic noir takes many of its tropes from classical Gothic fiction, which was popularized in Great Britain and the United States during the mid-1800s. This was the Victorian period, where high standards of morality and respectability—especially for middle- and upper-class women—masked more complex realities. In Gothic fiction, grand domestic settings like mansions and stately family homes often reveal secrets of incest, violence, and other crimes.