Carson Faust is a two-spirit writer and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina, the Native community whose home ground is the Edisto River and Four Holes Swamp country of Dorchester County. His first novel, If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, October 2025), is the first major work of fiction to bring that community’s history and folklore into the Southern Gothic tradition. For a site about the stories buried in this county, he is the most important living writer we could point you to.
Who is Carson Faust?
Faust is an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe, one of South Carolina’s state-recognized tribes, whose members have lived along the Edisto River and around Four Holes Swamp near Ridgeville for centuries. (We cover that history on our page about the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe and the Four Holes Indian Community.) He now lives in Minnesota, where he has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation, two of the most competitive awards for emerging writers in the upper Midwest.
Before the novel, his short fiction appeared in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (Vintage, 2023), the collection edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. that put a generation of Native horror writers in front of a national audience. That anthology is the right place to start if you want to understand the movement Faust belongs to: dark fiction written from inside Indigenous communities, where the horror is often history and the ghosts are often relatives.
What is If the Dead Belong Here about?
A six-year-old girl named Laurel Taylor disappears from her family’s home in the small town of Jordan, Wisconsin, in 1996. The search fails. Her older sister, Nadine, begins having dreams she can’t tell from waking, and comes to believe Laurel’s disappearance is bound up with older losses in the family. With the guidance of her mother Ayita, her Aunt Rosebud, and the elders around them, Nadine sets out to lay the family’s dead to rest, on the theory that the only way to find her sister is to settle what came before her.
The book moves among three years, 1899, 1951 and 1996, and two landscapes: the Wisconsin woods where the family lives now, and the Edisto River country in South Carolina they came from. The river appears under its older name, the Pon Pon, which is what the Edisto was called on the colonial maps of the Lowcountry. Faust has said the novel draws on his own family’s history, and the Edisto sections read like it.
Is If the Dead Belong Here a horror novel or a Southern Gothic novel?
Viking sells it as a Native American Southern Gothic, and that’s the right label. There are ghosts, and there are creatures in the Wisconsin woods that don’t get explained, and there is rootwork, the Lowcountry folk magic that Native, Black and white families along the Edisto all practiced and still do. But the book’s real subject is inheritance: what a family carries forward from the places it was driven out of, and what it costs the youngest generation to carry it. Reviewers have compared it to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is the correct comparison, because in both books the ghost is not a visitor. The ghost is the past, and it belongs in the house.
If you want the full definition of the tradition Faust is writing in, see What Is Southern Gothic?. His novel checks every box on that page and then adds one the founding writers mostly left out: the people who were here before the plantations.
Why the Edisto Natchez-Kusso connection matters
Southern Gothic has always been about the land remembering what the people would rather forget. For a hundred years the genre told that story almost entirely from the porch of the plantation house, or from the mill town below it. The Native families who were living along the Edisto before any of that was built, and who are still here, mostly didn’t appear, or appeared as scenery.
The Edisto Natchez-Kusso are descended from the Kusso, or Cusabo, peoples who met the first English settlers at Charles Town in 1670, and from Natchez refugees who came east after the French destroyed their nation on the Mississippi in the 1730s. They settled in the hard country around Four Holes Swamp, which is where the county’s oldest cypress forest still stands, and they stayed through three centuries that tried to erase them. We’ve written about the Cusabo and the Yamasee War of 1715 separately. Faust’s novel is what that history looks like from the inside, written by someone whose family lived it.
That is why this page exists. County Line Confidential is a fiction project set in Dorchester County, and we take the county’s real history seriously, which means taking seriously that the river our stories keep returning to had a name before Edisto, and a people before any of ours.
Where to start
- If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, 2025). Hardcover, ebook and audiobook; paperback due in fall 2026.
- Never Whistle at Night (Vintage, 2023). The anthology, for Faust’s earlier short fiction and two dozen other Native dark-fiction writers.
- The Edisto itself. Givhans Ferry State Park is the easiest place in the county to stand on the river Faust’s family came from. Go at dusk.
If you came here for Faust
Our dispatches are set along the same river. The Edisto Keeps Its Own is the one to read first; its title is the thesis of the whole series, and it would not surprise anyone who grew up on the Pon Pon. The Fourth Hole goes into Four Holes Swamp. From there, start at the beginning with Almost Here, or browse the full list.
For more writers in this tradition, see Top 10 Southern Gothic Authors to Read and 7 Books for Fans of Lowcountry Gothic.
Sources
- Penguin Random House, If the Dead Belong Here publisher page and author biography.
- Chicago Review of Books, review of If the Dead Belong Here, October 2025.
- South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs, state-recognized tribes list.