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.

These spaces are haunted by ghosts and supernatural occurrences that stand in for the persistence of truth that threatens to resurface and tear away the guilty party’s façade of respectability. In Gothic fiction, these grand spaces are destroyed, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839); or the secrets hidden in locked spaces are revealed, as in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859).

Unmissing uses this trope in its domestic settings. The Colettos’ mansion by the sea stands for their respectable public life, while Luca’s cabin in the woods and the Colettos’ dilapidated farmhouse are the spaces in which the criminal truth comes to light. Lydia returns as the story’s “ghost.” Her descriptions as skeletal, dark, and hollow-eyed frame her as the past coming back to haunt Luca and Merritt. Lydia succeeds in revealing their crimes, restoring at least partial justice, which is another element of Gothic fiction.