Do ghosts haunt us, or do we haunt them?
In If the Dead Belong Here, Carson Faust’s debut novel, blends the real with the supernatural, asking readers what happens when the dead aren’t confined to the places we leave behind, but instead move with us through time and space. The result is a ghost story that reveals the only thing more terrifying than ghosts of the returning dead are the ghosts of our past.
It’s 1996, in Jordan, Wisconsin, and six-year-old Laurel Taylor is missing without a trace. Four hours after Laurel’s disappearance, her sister Nadine feels the emptiness of Laurel’s bed before fully realizing that her sister is gone. Their mother, Ayita, is already in a fragile state due to her history with her abusive ex, Barron, and is drowning her pain in alcohol. Which only worsens as she comes to terms with the fact that her daughter is missing. Their household, already precariously held together by Ayita’s aunt, Rosebud Crowe, who lives with them to help care for the children, is now in turmoil as they all try to come together in their own ways to find Laurel and bring her home.
As the search for Laurel continues, hours turn into days, and days stretch into weeks, leading to dead ends. In the midst of this, Ayita struggles to cope with the grief of her missing daughter while also facing the haunting memories from her past. Meanwhile, Nadine is determined not to fall into the same pitfalls as her mother and takes matters into her own hands. She searches for answers beyond the ordinary, seeking guidance from elders and ancestors who assist her in her quest to find her sister.
Within the first opening pages, Faust makes clear that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill mystery where searching for clues is a matter of who took Laurel, but rather what. Faust sets the tone with an arresting introduction that is packed with suspense and hints at the supernatural occurrences yet to occur. The novel opens with Laurel being taken from her home by intruders, and is written from a third-person narrative. This perspective gives the sense of watching this story unfold as a bystander and bearing witness to Laurel’s abduction. This feeling of ‘bearing witness’ is felt throughout the story as we follow Nadine, Ayita, and Aunt Rosebud on their quest to find Laurel. Faust crafts the novel in a way that pulls the reader into an interwoven tapestry of Nadine and Ayita’s family history, separating the story into four parts and with timelines jumping from 1899 to 1951 to 1996, as well as transporting the reader from the Wisconsin woods that are home to unfamiliar creatures to the Edisto (Ponpon) River in South Carolina that carry more than water. The effect is that I, as a reader, felt like a ghost haunting the story as it moves between timelines, uncovering family histories, ancestral practices, Native American history, and folklore.
As we learn more about the family history of Nadine and Ayita, we dive deeper into the history of colonialism and the generational scars left on Native American families through Nadine and Ayita’s family lineage. From the moments when we go back in time to learn about Ayita’s mother, Prentiss, being forced to view her Native American culture and rootwork practices as evil by her Christian father and how this echoed into Ayita’s childhood, where she and her brother, Morgan, attend Bible study summer school and are indoctrinated with the teachings of christianity and forced to erase their cultural teachings. We are confronted with the aftermath of the erasure of Native American culture, spiritual practices, and repression of sexual identity. At the same time, drawing parallels between past actions and their impact on future behaviors of characters, and reflecting on the present-day consequences for generations to come. My reading experience felt like moving through water; I flowed through the lives and timelines of Nadine and Ayita’s family tree, witnessing past lives and actions ripple through time, only to come back to the beginning and remember where it all began.
Faust further weaves in themes of generational trauma, grief, and remembrance, which prompted me to ask myself: Are we destined to repeat the actions of our ancestors? How can we heal family lineages and move through grief? These themes become apparent when we learn the ghosts that haunt Nadine are more than a shadow but also a symbol of her fear of being alone and becoming like her mother Ayita, who crumbled under the weight of her own grief. We see moments of generational cycles repeated in the novel, where Nadine slips into a pattern similar to her mother’s.
Although this is Faust’s debut novel, he is no stranger to exploring grief, death, and Native American folklore through fiction. He pulls inspiration from his own family history as a two-spirit enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina and his short story, Eulogy for a Brother, Resurrected, featured in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, also explores his own experience with generational trauma, queerness, and grief by also exploring the question of what we are willing to do to bring our loved ones back from the dead.
In If the Dead Belong Here, Faust delves even deeper into these themes by examining the full weight of grief. The emotion of grief throughout the novel plays a central role, as the characters are never truly able to move forward while engulfed in despair. They move between the action of searching for Laurel while simultaneously grappling with the heartache and confusion of her disappearance, constantly yearning for her return. I found this back and forth between the sentiments of letting grief consume you vs. taking action to move through the grief to be especially moving in how it conveys the realistic struggle of dealing with the loss of a loved one, which is never something that you move on from, but something that you carry and exist in tandem with everyday life.
Knowing that the novel was initially titled When the Living Haunt the Dead is vital here, as the story emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between the ghosts and the characters. Throughout the novel, Faust calls readers to lean into grief and invoke the act of remembrance because the only way forward is to go back and revisit the stories and ancestors that came before us.
For readers who enjoyed Toni Morrison’s Beloved, consider adding this novel to your collection of Southern Gothic titles, which similarly blend elements of historical fiction, the supernatural, and magical realism. If the Dead Belong Here is a hauntingly intricate novel, expanding on the concept of the ghost story, using the notion of ghosts as not only the spirits of the dead but also the spirits of our past. From start to finish, as the mysteries surrounding Laurel’s disappearance unravel, each thread of the timelines and locations weaves together to create a textured and compelling story about remembering culture, ancestors, and those we have lost.
FICTION
By Carson Faust
Viking
Published October 07, 2025
