carson faust

Author of
When the Living Haunt the Dead (Viking, 2024)

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 the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Hill Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, ANMLY, Waxwing Magazine, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (Vintage, 2023). He lives in Minnesota, where he is at work on a second novel.

Twitter / Instagram / carsonfaust.com / Represented by Annie Hwang

When the Living Haunt the Dead (Viking, 2024)

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her single mother, teenage sister, and great aunt are left reeling from the loss and must find their own ways of mourning, coping, and searching.

Haunted not only by the loss of her sister, but also reoccurring nightmares of a violent, shadowy figure, Nadine Taylor begins to believe Laurel’s disappearance may have something to do with their family’s past. Nadine and Laurel’s mother, however, remains certain that her youngest has been kidnapped by her daughters’ estranged father—furthering the rift in their disintegrating family. Nadine, compelled by her visions and stirred by the unravelling of her mother, sets off on a journey with her great aunt to return to their ancestral homeland, where lingering ghosts and estranged relatives may hold the key to healing old wounds and reuniting their family.

Drawing on his tribe’s mythology and personal family history, Carson Faust presents a kaleidoscopic, multigenerational ghost story that examines what it means to survive not only the things that have been done to us, but the things we do to one another—uncovering all the ways in which who we are, where we come from, and what we believe, can be erased and reclaimed.