Ghosts have more on their minds than sneaking through walls and spooking us, according to novelist Carson Faust.
“I often think of ghosts as just people with communication issues,” said Faust, who lives in St. Louis Park with husband Samuel Farrand. “It’s not that they’re trying to scare us. They’re stuck in one particular moment, a moment they have held onto after they’re gone. And those are not always the most pleasant things to carry, so they might not show up in the most pleasant ways.”
Faust, whose day job is working in philanthropy at the Northwest Area Foundation, has no personal experience with ghosts, but others in his family do. His grandmother Betty — to whom his novel “If the Dead Belong Here” is dedicated — once evicted some.
“She was with her partner for 50-some years and his parents didn’t like her — I think it was racism,” said Faust, who is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina (he grew up in South Carolina and Mount Horeb, Wis.). “They had died but, if you ask my grandma, they were still in the house, stomping up the stairs at night and messing with the rocking chair. Eventually she said to them, ‘This is my house. You have to go.’ And they did.”
The ghosts in “If the Dead Belong Here” are more dangerous. In the opening chapters, young Laurel Taylor disappears, and her family members spend the rest of the book searching for her, with the help and sometimes hindrance of their late ancestors. Faust is matter-of-fact about those ancestors.
“In a lot of works of horror, ghosts are helping people who are alive survive the things that the ghosts could not. That’s where I operate from,” said Faust, 32. “It has everything to do with rebirth, which is what I think a ghost is: a consciousness that carries on after scientific death occurs.”
That belief is similar to a mentor of Faust’s, Minnesota Book Award-winning writer Mona Susan Power, who has said of a book about ghosts she’s currently writing, “Each of them has a problem in their past that they haven’t addressed, and certainly not healed.”
Faust’s novel began as a master’s degree thesis at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Faust graduated in 2019, with a manuscript about one-fourth the length of its current 391 pages. Since school, he has been working on the book, reaching out to publishers and signing with agent Annie Hwang, whom he contacted after noticing she represented a writer he’d met in grad school, Sequoia Nagamatsu.