Book Summary and Reviews of If the Dead Belong Here by Carson Faust

Book Summary

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.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. In If the Dead Belong Here, the Taylor family's personal tragedies collide with the enduring traumas that haunt Indigenous people in America. How do the specters of colonization, assimilation, and their forced removal from their ancestral homeland shape the ways that the Taylor family continues to be haunted?
2. If the Dead Belong Here weaves itself across five generations and is told through the eyes of multiple members of the Taylor family, both living and dead. What did you think of the choice to skip back and forth in time throughout the book? What do the different characters' perspectives reveal about the Taylor family's history and the forces that have haunted them? Was there a character that you particularly resonated with? ...