If the Dead Belong Here

If the Dead Belong Here by Carson Faust is at once a chilling supernatural tale and a story of generational trauma told beautifully through the eyes of several generations of a family of Native American women.

When 15-year-old Nadine’s father left 6 years ago, her mother Ayita stopped caring about anything except Nadine’s new baby sister Laurel, born several months after their father left. So when Laurel goes missing, she retreats into the bottle harder than before, so it’s up to Nadine and her mother’s aunts and grandmother to find her - because they know she wasn’t taken by anything living - and possibly not even anything human.

Through Laurel’s eyes, we know how she left, but it takes learning the lore and history of her family and the world they inhabit over several generations for us to understand the where and with whom (or what).

From Sophronia at the turn of the 20th century down a line of Native American women to Nadine in 1996, we watch as they are persecuted as indigenous, as women, and as witches by even those closest to them, especially husbands and fathers. As we witness this through their points of view, we also learn the lore of the others, the “shadow people”, who taught them their craft, but not without cost and danger. Danger from within and without, from habits which connect them to the shadow world, like the poisons in tobacco and alcohol to the toxic relationships they are drawn to, with generations being subject to the fists of the men in their lives.

If the Deqd Belong Here is a bit of a slow burn, but the character and world-building are rich and feel real, even with the supernatural elements, and the folklore and storytelling is worth slowing down for as we follow these women’s journey to its bittersweet conclusion.

Some words I liked:

“You kill yourself just enough to blur the world.”

Thank you to NetGalley and Viking Penguin for the review copy for my honest opinion.

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