“The intruders enter as quiet as light. They come through the windows, the doors. Slipping in easily, as if their girl left this house open for them. They have been here before….”
In Carson Faust’s If the Dead Belong Here, it is 1996, in the town of Jordan, Wisconsin, and six-year-old Laurel Taylor has vanished in the night. Her mother, Ayita, is lost to the bottle. Her abusive father, Barron, was banished long ago. Her great aunt, Rosebud, from the South Carolina Lowcountry, keeps spinning nonsense tales about the Little People and “the in-between.” It is up to Laurel’s thirteen-year-old sister Nadine to actually do something – but she doesn’t know where to start.
“I’m not sad anymore,” she tells Ayita. “I’m angry. I’m so angry, Mom.”
Her quest will take her several weeks and lead her to places she never thought she’d go – back to South Carolina, back through generations of her family and the many secrets and traumas hidden there, back to stories she can barely find credible, but somehow knows are true.
Are they the key to finding her sister? Or will Nadine, too, vanish into the night?
Filled with ferocity and lyrical brilliance, with ghosts both real and figurative, with the histories and legacies that not only shape our present, but that we build for ourselves, If the Dead Belong Here will linger in your imagination long after the last page…and maybe cause you to leave an extra light on. Just in case.
Says the author: “My grandmother’s stories, and, in many ways, the silences I grew up surrounded by, inspired and informed this book. Her eldest son, my uncle Shane, was killed in a tragedy long before I was born. This weighed heavily on my family. His death—and many of the tragedies in my family—were seldom spoken of, so this novel is my way of processing the histories I inherited. By bringing ghosts to the page, I found I was able to process—and try to give life and voice to inherited histories and silences. Writing this work also made me brave enough to ask questions about our family that I didn’t always have the language for. Much of this novel comes from listening.
“In listening to my grandmother’s stories, I found ways of connecting to family histories I once considered lost. My grandma spoke of a healer talking the pain out of her brother’s burns. She told me what liquors mix poorly with our blood and bring out the worst in us. She shared the meanings of certain dreams and told me about conversations she held with ghosts.
The idea of having conversations with ghosts combats the silence I was trying to write my way out of. A ghost is the voice or presence of a person that has been silenced by death, and, often, tragedy.
“Hauntings can seem mysterious or unknowable. But if you’re haunted, there is one thing you know for certain: that you are not alone. Ghosts are just a certain kind of light that we can’t always see. All they want is to be seen. For their stories to be told. For their knowledge to be passed down. Haunting is just a way of staying. And in a book that delves into so much loss, I think a haunting can be a kind of mercy.”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Carson Faust, go here.
