Carson Faust launches If the Dead Belong Here with Mona Susan Power

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family's secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic

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 by 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.

Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, ANMLY, and Waxwing, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota, where he works in philanthropy.

Mona Susan Power is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and A Council of Dolls (winner of the Minnesota Book Award, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe (Yanktonai Dakota), currently living in Minnesota.

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