If he dies, he would like her to have his body. Sequoyah does not desire Rosemary so much as want to be her. It is not sexual attraction, but a mysterious, even mystical, twin-ship. Right from the start, Sequoyah is fascinated by the elusive Rosemary. He’s working on a novel about a society in decline, reads sophisticated religious and philosophical texts, and engages in charitable works. Rosemary is a beautiful, artistic, and death-obsessed Kiowa girl, who may have been involved in prostitution and drugs, while George is a boy genius. He lives with Harold and Agnes Troutt and two other eccentric, troubled, and traumatized foster kids: Rosemary Blackwell (there’s a lot of black in this book) and 13-year-old George. Sequoyah’s addicted mother couldn’t keep a job, and her neglected son wandered the streets in the company of other lost boys and shady characters.) After stints in shelters and juvenile detention centres, the boy ultimately finds himself on the outskirts of Little Crow, near Black River in rural Oklahoma.

(Prior to this, the two had fled domestic abuse in Cherokee Country for a different type of instability in Tulsa, but the bad spirits followed them like smoke. The narrator provides a slippery account of the events leading up to the young woman’s death.ġ989 is the year that Sequoyah is placed in foster care-after his alcoholic mother is imprisoned on drug-related charges. Hobson’s text can be annoyingly ambiguous at times, but a close, attentive reading suggests that Sequoyah had a role in her demise, which is depicted as a strange one: both a murder and a suicide-of a single person. Sequoyah, a member of Oklahoma’s Cherokee Nation and the unreliable narrator of Where the Dead Sit Talking, looks back to 1989 when he was 15 and witnessed the death of a 17-year-old girl.

Where the dead sit talking