While I’ve never been one to match my reading habits to the seasons, I recognize certain books pair well with different times of year. Breezy novels for summer, thick heady tomes for winter. Fall books tend to be moody—something to get you to feel. Carson Faust’s If the Dead Belong Here is the ideal fall book, perfect to read curled up with a blanket and hot mug of tea.
If the Dead Belong Here deals with the disappearance of six-year-old Laurel, and how her family navigates the aftermath of her loss. Moving through time and varying perspectives, it is a gorgeous meditation on grief—with appearances by those the living are grieving: yes, as ghosts. But despite the ghosts, or maybe because of them, I’d describe If the Dead Belong Here as a family saga. While it deals with the preternatural, exploring what it means to be haunted, at its core, it’s a story of the love and legacy of family—including chosen family.
I read the novel over the summer, the time my reading habits tend toward quickly tearing through books. But If the Dead Belong Here slowed me down, in the very best way. Despite wanting to know what happened to Laurel, her sister Nadine, her mother Ayita, and the rest of the family, I was spellbound by Faust’s poetic prose and wanted to savor the novel as long as possible.
I met Carson Faust at Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021, and he is the person who introduced me to astrology. Before the interview, we emailed about this novel being a Libra—fitting for such a gorgeous book. I loved getting the opportunity to catch up about his debut novel and discuss storytelling, ghosts, and fear.
Rachel León: You mention in the acknowledgments this book wouldn’t exist without your grandma Betty and the stories she shared with you about ghosts. Should we start by honoring your grandma and the power of storytelling?
Carson Faust: Absolutely. A lot of the novel stemmed from family silences when I was growing up. The narrative centers around loss, especially that of my uncle Shane. I think my uncle Shane was 15 when he passed, and my dad would have been 13 or 14. The circumstances around my uncle’s death weren’t revealed to me early on, but I know now that it was always kind of hanging over my family. As I grew up, I started asking questions—my aunties and my grandma were more willing to talk about losses and processing grief. It wasn’t until I was late into my teenage years and adulthood that I truly started listening to family stories. My grandma talks about what people would consider preternatural things. She chats about when she started dating her partner, who she was with for like 50 years: “His parents, even after they died, wouldn’t leave me alone. They’d always hated me, so they stayed in the house and stomped up and down the stairs and made a ruckus in the rocking chair. I eventually had to talk to them and say, Listen, this is our house now; you have to leave.”…I’ve never had experiences with ghosts like that, but that they were brought up as if they’re people—because they are—shaped how I thought about ghosts in this novel. I think of ghosts as people with very limited communication skills.
Communing with ghosts, both through storytelling, and in a novel, was a way of combating silence. Bringing ghosts into the novel was a way of bringing folks who were not physically there into the narrative itself. This novel moves through time, so it was a way of bringing the past into the present of the novel.
RL: So the (written) novel was inspired by your grandma’s (orally told) stories—I’m wondering what each form can and can’t do.
I think of ghosts as people with very limited communication skills.
CF: I think when you tell a story orally, it’s often a recounting of a perspective. Whereas writing on the page—my preferred mode of communication—allows you space to ruminate and obsess and get into the psychology of a choice. If I’m relayed a family story from someone, their opinion can come through in tone or in the information they’re sharing. I found it kind of liberating: I felt a level of agency as I retold and fictionalized my family history. I could think: If this person had made a slightly different choice, what might the result have been? Or, if the last conversation with this person had gone this way, how would that translate to the emotional charge of the loss?
RL: At the beginning of the novel is a family tree, and while I used to think such an inclusion was to help orient the reader, in your novel, it felt like a nod to lineage, legacy, and inheritance.
CF: A good deal of my family in South Carolina map out their family trees in the front page of their Bibles. So to me, the presence of a family tree at the beginning is a nod to that. In previous drafts, there were also more structurally heavy-handed reinterpretations of the documents that I thumbed through as I was doing research—affidavits, census records, anthropological studies…non-primary sources about my family. As I was writing, I was like, do I need to center how other voices have described my family in the past? It became more important to instead center voices that reminded me of my grandma. In a world where so much information on Native people comes from non-Native sources, I had the license in this novel to tell the story how I think it will best come across. And the closest I can get to a voice that sounds and feels like the ones I heard telling these stories growing up feels correct for this novel.
RL: This novel is beautifully poetic, but also has a strong plot. I’ve heard writers talk like it’s either one or the other, maybe because it’s hard to pull off both organically. But you do. Any thoughts on the marriage between language and story?
CF: I don’t identify as a plotter, so I appreciate that it’s coming across okay as it’s not my natural state. When I draft, it’s not even language driven, but emotion driven. I’m trying to capture a moment, and it’s not until later that I can connect that moment to an arc, which is what plot asks of you. For me, it’s easier to bring a plot to an organic situation. If you start with plot and try to imbue some chaos later, I find that more challenging. I feel the same way about the language. I am by nature a little ornate with my writing. It’s the editing process that allows me to peel some of that back. What I try to think about as I edit: Is this metaphor serving the structure of the narrative? There are plenty of cool metaphors you can use, but if it doesn’t fit the tone of the piece, it might not belong.
RL: We get two male perspectives, but the women dominate this story, and the family is very matrilineal. Can you talk about this decision?
CF: It’s funny, it doesn’t feel like a decision per se—it’s how the story came to me. When you edit a book, you start to ruminate: Why did it come up that way? Almost all of the lessons that I carry with me came from the women in my life. My true strength came from elder women, like my grandma and my aunts and folks who shaped who I am. I think that’s why the women in this story came to me so fully formed.
I want to make sure I’m doing this as accurately as possible, and I’m presenting women that feel real, because that can be a challenge for anyone, but especially as a male writer. I want to do as best I can to make it feel true and authentic, and I hope it came across that way. Because so many layers of myself reflect more deeply the lessons that the women in my life gave me, it felt easier to do.
RL: I’d like to talk about one of the male characters: Morgan.
CF: Morgan’s narrative first came to me from an emotional sense. Morgan is a 15-year-old gay boy in the 70s in the deep South. When you’re that young, it feels easier to run away, sever ties, and start your life anew. It doesn’t always feel realistic or desirable to fight the battles one would need to fight—with relatives, loved ones, the community—to just be your authentic self. Morgan’s impulse to escape is based in fear, but it’s a fear of self. The fear of starting anew is much smaller than the fear of confronting potential rejection violence and seeing love transform into something ugly.
I think a novel is a vehicle for obsession. And every character in this novel is seeking connection. Often, they’re not getting it from the source that they want it from, so they find other ways of feeling that connection. Morgan fears a weakness in his connection to his family if he is his authentic self, so he seeks connection with Fallon. We have Nadine, who’s like, I’m a huge support for my mother, but she is unable to support me. So she goes to Dallas. It’s that aspect of chosen family or chosen people—it takes shapes in ways you don’t always expect.
RL: Reading Morgan’s story now, as we’re again seeing assaults on LGBTQIA+ rights, made me think of something I heard Carmen Maria Machado say recently. She was talking about how history is a circle, that people think we move forward and make progress, but we don’t, we return to the same stuff over and over.
CF: I agree that history happens in cycles, and current affairs happen in cycles. Violence and bigotry don’t go away, but they change shape. Right now, we’re seeing all of these attacks on trans folks. I think people who benefit from violence are cowards, so they often go after the smallest population, or the smallest category of person within a community, and see what they can get away with, then build from there. These cowards have no interest in taking on the whole of any community.
A novel is a vehicle for obsession.
In terms of Morgan’s narrative—he’s the only person in that small community who is queer, so of course, he is going to be a target for bigotry—that’s where all the aggression is going to go because he’s the only option. This violence doesn’t go away. It just changes shape.
It’s in my mind that as long as I’m alive, these themes will be relevant.
RL: You posted on Instagram recently that you hope these ghost stories also prove to be love stories, which is beautiful and true to the novel.
CF: One of the many things I was trying to subvert was genre. It’s less common now, but in many stories, the ghost is there for vengeance, and the ghost wants their death to be explained. They want everyone to understand what they had to live through. The way my grandma talks about ghosts, and the way she interacted with my uncle’s ghost after he passed, was very different. He came to her the week of his death, and explained he was okay and had passed on. There are times when she’s told me that story where she feels peaceful about it, but there are other times where she’s terrified.
RL: So the stories are the same, but her response to them changes?
CF: Yeah, the first time, she was like, “I was really glad that he told me he was okay. I got some closure.” And then I asked her a couple weeks ago, and she said, “I hate ghosts. I hate when they show up. It’s awful.” I’m like, Well, which is it? The answer is it’s all of it.
In this novel, so many of the ghosts are trying to connect with their relatives because their communication skills are not fantastic. Their communication is read as terrifying, and it probably is, but they don’t know that. Here, ghosts are trying to help their family—it is based in love and wanting their relatives to survive what they couldn’t. “Just because I couldn’t make it through this disease, this depression, whatever it may be, it does not mean that you have to do the same.” It’s a cliche that love is an action, but the ghosts in this novel are trying to spark these characters into action, and in most cases it works because they’re terrifying.
RL: I’d like to contextualize the novel within the scope of contemporary literature. You had a story in the 2023 anthology Never Whistle at Night. It seems to me like there’s a bit of a renaissance with Indigenous horror stories. But then I also wouldn’t consider this horror, I suppose…
CF: I think horror does the same thing that a lot of literary novels do. Horror specifically is good at taking the temperature of where society is at. Think of the way Get Out contextualized police violence. Horror novels and movies are like temperature checks for what was scaring people at the time. In terms of Native representation and BIPOC representation in the genre of horror, I think there’s a lot of anxiety about race in the United States—go figure. One of the novels that really shaped how I began writing this novel was White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, which is very much a novel about how the UK deals with race and colonization. I think that’s why I responded to that novel so strongly. The novel gave me a map as to how to write this one.
Horror specifically is good at taking the temperature of where society is at.
I interviewed Stephen Graham Jones recently and he said something along the lines of: for the longest time he felt he was walking on two different paths—he would write hyper-literary novels, and he would write hyper-horror novels, and he wouldn’t attempt to mix the two. But he reached a point in his career where he finally wrote something that was literary and horror. He finally gave himself permission to walk in both worlds. When Station Eleven was nominated as a finalist for the National Book Award, that was huge—that a sci-fi-leaning dystopian novel was heralded in literary circles. We’ve been moving toward this space of breaking down that barrier between genre and literary fiction for a long time, and I’m glad to see it, because I sometimes struggle with straight up genre fiction and with straight up literary fiction—I need both.
RL: If you had to categorize the novel, would you call it literary horror?
CF: I didn’t write this novel attempting for it to be scary. I didn’t want one of the emotions that people walk away from this book with to be fear. I think the presence of ghosts and the presence of preternatural elements will lead people to read it as horror, and I welcome that. But if intent matters—I’m going to embarrass myself here, but I was reading my Goodreads reviews, and somebody who I very much agree with, was like, This is less of a horror/fear novel and more of a sadness and despair novel. That’s true. I’m always trying to be depressing. There are things that will scare some people in this book, but I find what the living people endure to be much more horrifying than any of the stuff that ghosts and spirits are capable of. The living beings with more agency in this novel are far more terrifying than whatever the ghosts can pull out.
RL: Yeah, I never thought this novel was trying to generate fear. I read it as a meditation on grief and loss.
CF: Cancer being sad? Groundbreaking. [Laughs]
RL: I loved how you illustrated the way substance use can offer a thinning of the veil, which is something I hadn’t considered before.
CF: I think about heavy substance abuse in the same way I do about any form of self-harm—it often stems from or manifests when you feel that you have no control. Like harming yourself in some way is something you can control. A lot of characters in this novel, when they feel they don’t have control—over a situation, over themselves, over the world at large—turn to these different forms of self-harm. Alcohol is a poison, and poison, by its very nature, does bring you closer to death. When Nadine finally feels the presence of the preternatural world is when she’s near death. The more death that surrounds you, the closer you get to it yourself. Those are all ways of thinning the veil. And to me, that’s just becoming aware of your own mortality. It’s less about the act of crossing over somewhere, more about your awareness of where consciousness will or won’t go after a chapter closes.
RL: You’re the person who introduced me to astrology, so I thought we could end on an astrological note. You’re an eighth house sun, and eighth house suns are said to be intuitive, not shying away from the hard things like death and mysteries, because they understand that these things are also responsible for rebirth and transformation. Is that true for you?
CF: Yes, obviously. And even outside of writing, I’m that same way. When I even think about the music I would listen to growing up… I’m like, You are 10 years old. What do you have to be sad about? It feels dramatic, but I think melancholy and heartbreak are things certain people inherit. Even if life were just peachy keen, I would find something to be melancholy about. It’s built into my DNA.
