I mostly like it. I try to keep a mind-set I developed with Lost : this fictional world was made up by some pretty bright and creative people, who are by no means able to make every last detail fit a perfect pattern. So I won't sweat lapses if the overall story seems interesting, buy I will roll my eyes a bit if it becomes obvious that they are straining to show how clever they are.
I try to imagine what a realistic response would be to such a catastrophic and supernatural event -- essentially everyone has had their view/ expectation of the way the world works shattered, and the average person has probably lost at least 20 people they know by name. Piling on top of this, everyone else you know would be grieving their own losses. I would expect that the first year following would be particulary harrowing -- many people expecting another mass disappearance, desperate seeking of explanations, boatloads of nihilism, suicides. I would think the civil order would come close to breaking down in the first couple of weeks and the first anniversary would be extremely dangerous, too. I'd be saying "fuck" a lot for the rest of my life, so I find the mayor's language pretty understandable, even if not up to our world's standards of decorum.
A calculation: if you look at all families of 4, and the disappearances are in fact random, then 92% of families would lose no members, 7.5% would lose one. 0.23% of these families would lose 2 members, 0.003% would lose 3 members and one in every 6 million familes would disappear completely. Any city of about 100,000 would have a reasonable chance of having a person like Nora, most states would have several small towns with the same.
I expect there are many new cults in the Oct 14 world; Wayne's is a small but worrisome one, I expect the GR may be much larger but somehow less threatening to TPTB. I am somewhat interested in learning their "theology" if it can be done in a way that makes a good story. OTOH, I find plots that are driven by passive women being unable/ unwilling to communicate to be very frustrating, so I have ambivalent expectations.
I am hoping that Tom and Cynthia's journey will be providing us with numerous glimpses of the country at large -- I am totally uninterested in a potential young love story.