Vanished
A novel of myth, loss, and ecological mystery.
Set against the disappearance of the world we were promised, Vanished follows what a place remembers after the people who named it are gone — and what is asked of those who arrive too late to save it, but not too late to witness.
Fiction Field-research driven Forthcoming 2026
Vanished
A novel
Matthew Wilburn King
Years in the making and shaped by three decades of field research across forty-five countries, Vanished is a meditation on what disappears slowly enough that no one calls it an emergency — and the people who decide to pay attention anyway.
It is a novel in the tradition of the books that taught Matthew to write: stories where the land is a character, where myth and science are not opponents, and where the largest questions arrive through the smallest, most human doorways.
Not one talk. Three decades of work.
01
Myth & memory
What a culture carries forward when the landscape that shaped it is gone.
02
Ecological loss
Not as statistic, but as the slow disappearance of a world a generation was promised.
03
Inheritance
What we owe a future that may not be there to receive it — and what it owes us back.
From the opening chapter.
H ermes quickly patted himself from head to toe, moving his hands over his skin to verify he was still there. His heart sank as his fingers found bare skin where his wedding ring should be, and he fled for camp.
He plunged into the jungle, breath ragged, as sweat stung his eyes—every step a desperate bid for the well-worn trail beneath. Leaving the river’s light, he moved swiftly through the darkening forest.
Sweat bees attempted to smash into his tear ducts, and mosquitoes smelled blood and swarmed his bare body, a sharp reminder of the rainforest’s relentlessness. Low-hanging branches lashed his skin. Leaves, sticks, and the stone-strewn trail cut his feet, but he moved with total abandon.
Stumbling into camp gutted Hermes. He closed his eyes in frustration and shook his head rapidly. When he opened them again, the platform of palm trees on pilings, the thatched huts with their thin cane walls, and the tufts of palm that served as roofs were all gone.
He let go of the hope that only his own things had disappeared when he saw that their clay-colored Cushmas, hollowed gourds, monkey-skin drums, cane flutes, cassava sieves, and necklaces made of teeth and bones had vanished. The scene was breathtakingly surreal—it was now just them and the rainforest. The Maachi’s huts and communal structures, all of it, had vanished into thin air.
Figures darted through the clearing in a frantic ballet, their naked forms ghostly against the encroaching night. Hermes heard people shouting, some of them arguing, and saw others collapsed on the ground. No one noticed him.
But he saw that the tribe’s ever-present anklets and bracelets were also gone. Headpieces of parrot, macaw, toucan, and cockatoo feathers were gone. Their bows and bamboo arrowheads were gone.
Only the haunted clearing remained, a silent witness to the huts that had vanished mere moments before. Bare earth, endlessly dense green jungle, and a wall of deepening darkness enveloped them.
Silence enshrouded the Maachi, their faces etched with confusion, witnesses to the bewildering nightmare unfolding before them. Hermes saw a few women and children huddled together where the huts once stood, staring at their guests. A young boy, no older than five, buried his tears in the folds of his mother’s leg, clinging to her as if her very skin could shield him from the world’s caprice.
What remains of us when the human-made world disappears—and the only reality left is a living, watching Earth?
Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, an unprecedented expedition gathers at the edge of the known world. A team of scientists, spiritual leaders, and the uncontacted Maachi tribe have come together to investigate a series of bizarre, accelerating ecological anomalies.
Accompanying them is Aris Dalton Kingsley—his friends call him “Hermes”—a war-scarred investigative journalist and Cambridge-educated ethno-ecologist who has spent his career documenting global collapse without ever healing his own.
Summoned home by a desperate satellite call that his young daughter, Amelia, is dying back in England, Hermes prepares to leave the forest immediately. Instead, before he can escape the canopy, the unimaginable happens: in a single, unaccountable instant, every trace of human-made material reality vanishes from the Earth.
No planes, no glass, no guns. No satellites, no roads, no screens. Only bodies, memory, and a rainforest that has no use for human certainty.
As the team staggers through a world abruptly stripped of its inventions, Vanished becomes less a survival story than an initiation. The rainforest is no longer backdrop but interlocutor. Stripped of the illusions of dominance, Hermes is forced to confront a question he has long evaded: if the scaffolding of civilization is gone, what is left of a human life—of responsibility, of love, of meaning?
To reach his daughter, if that is even still possible, Hermes must cross a boundary where ecology, myth, and consciousness blur. What he encounters there will demand a choice whose consequence is not victory or defeat, but a completely different story of what it means to be human at all.
The Big Reframe
Humans revealed not as masters, but as one vulnerable strand in a sentient, indifferent, sometimes merciful web of life.
Mythic Rebirth
An encounter between ancient cosmologies and contemporary physics, where spirits, quantum fields, and evolutionary drives all ask the same urgent question: why do we live the way we do?
Love as Ontology
A father’s love explored not as mere sentiment, but as the last irreducible fact—a fierce, thermodynamic force that persists when even matter falls away.
Literary, mythic eco-fiction for readers drawn to the haunting clarity of Cormac McCarthy (The Road), the planetary vision of Richard Powers (The Overstory), the quiet apocalypses of Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), and the cosmological inquiries of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Manuscript in advanced revision and editorial development. Early chapters have been workshopped with literary professionals and trusted readers. A long-form literary work intended for traditional publication. If you are a literary agent or publishing professional who aligns with the vision, get in touch.
The novel arrives in 2026. The conversation is already underway.
Elemental, Matthew’s weekly Substack, is where excerpts, cover reveals, and publication news land first.
One Choice. One Act.
The companion field guide — small, deliberate acts as the architecture of a meaningful life.
See the field guide →