When a girl goes missing, which matters more: the truth or the story?
“I’ll never forget that impossible image. It’s burned into my retinas, with her dress and hair kind of fanned out in a mystical breeze as she did it. She was majestic. Otherworldly.”
In Blah, Blah, Rapture…, Thomas Steele transforms a missing-person narrative into a disturbing examination of the dangers that arise from the urge to mythologize real people. Set in 2012 amid lingering cultural anxiety about the end of the world, it blends literary fiction with psychological suspense, interrogating how myth-making, religion, and media spectacle distort truth. I am reminded of the themes and quiet dread of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” not through overt horror, but through the novel’s steady revelation of how ordinary people, often convinced of their own righteousness, participate in collective harm.
“I feel like we are in the middle of an ocean spilled from a cup. We are now just swirling and bobbing in place, going nowhere.”
The novel centers on “Baby” Mae Gypsum, a twenty-two-year-old college student who vanishes from the small town of Seldon, Pennsylvania. As days pass with no answers, noisy speculation fills the silence. Mae becomes a vessel for the town’s fears, desires, and obsessions: to some, she is an angel or prophet; to others, a seductive, manipulative, or even sinister witch.
An opportunistic local newspaper editor fuels the frenzy by publishing excerpts from Mae’s diaries under the sensational headline “The Vanishing Angel Case,” igniting a media storm that attracts academics, doomsayers, and self-interested community members. Notably absent from this cacophony are the voices of Mae herself and her parents, who search quietly and relentlessly, largely erased by the spectacle built around their loss.
“You’ll look at the artwork for a few more minutes and appreciate the pictures but then cast it aside for something you can relate to or understand. You have to make peace with your own limitations.”
Blah, Blah, Rapture… unfolds through vignettes of voices and documents. Each chapter adopts a different form, e.g. police reports, research notes, diary entries, and newspaper responses, often from people who know Mae only peripherally. This fragmented, telephone-game approach emphasizes the distance and distortion inherent in community gossip, revealing how hearsay hardens into conviction. Steele’s choice to withhold Mae’s own voice, even as others claim to interpret or explicitly exploit it, creates the unsettling tension that implicates readers as participants in this dangerous rumor mill, forcing us to rely on the perspectives of those with little to no genuine investment in Mae as a person.
“Sure, it was criminal and demeaning, but the public took notice and left their houses to get something done. Think of the togetherness.”
Though set in 2012, the novel feels surprisingly prescient in its warning about virality and the problems amplified in today’s social media age. While social media rarely appears explicitly, Steele captures the systems of outrage, moral panic, and performative concern with remarkable precision.
The prose is sharp, darkly funny, and deeply uncomfortable, exposing how quickly empathy gives way to consumption. The novel is razor-sharp in its critique of opportunistic journalism, academia, and religion, showing how institutions meant to seek truth instead magnify bias and self-interest.
“One thing people rarely realize to make things appetizing and appealing is that you want your goodies to look homemade but very high-end at the same time. That’s how you get the most people interested, men and women.”
Ultimately, Blah, Blah, Rapture… is less about what happens to Mae Gypsum than about what happens to a community when ambiguity becomes intolerable. It is a surprisingly disturbing novel that will captivate readers of experimental literary fiction and fans of writers such as Shirley Jackson and Agustina Bazterrica. Trigger warnings apply for abuse, violence, and murder. Prepare to be haunted by its ending.
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