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When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel?s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel?s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family. Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author's own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted?both by the supernatural and terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family?and a people?determined to heal from old wounds.
About the author
Carson Faust is the author of When the Living Haunt the Dead, forthcoming in 2025. He is two-spirit, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships the McKnight Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Jerome Hill Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly among other journals and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology.
