Vanishing Point
Felix Cheong
Singapore Ethos Books, 2012
ISBN: 9789810733865

3,000 people go missing every year in Singapore. Why do they disappear?

Felix Cheong's Vanishing Point is the first work of fiction by a Singapore writer to be inspired by real-life cases of missing persons. These stories do not speculate where these people have gone to but as a creative leap-off to explore the theme of absences and obsessions.

In 'In the Dark', a man who is obsessive-compulsive about white cleans his wife - literally - out of his life. In 'Remember the Wormhole of 2030', the prime minister of a small island nation abducts her ex-lover to prevent a scandal from exploding. In 'The 10th Floor', a crooked accountant has to deal nightly with strangers coming to his flat asking for a floor that doesn't exist.

These are stories suffused with a sharp sense of the surreal and the satirical, compared by writers like Daren Shiau and Boey Kim Cheng to Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Weaving in poetic turns of phrase for which he is known for, Cheong shows us how we often reach the vanishing point in the horizon even if we may not have physically vanished.