Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
Mason Dubisee, the hero of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's inventive first novel, Ghosted, is a magnet for classic bad-boy pastimes like cocaine, whisky, brawling, rocking out to Bob Seger and Texas Hold 'Em. The 30-year-old consorts with crooks and addicts, but is himself working on a first novel. "Breathe," he writes to himself in his manuscript notes. "Some days are better than other. Do NOT try to write after losing at poker."
While working at a hot-dog stand in downtown Toronto, owned by his drug-dealing friend Chaz, Mason ghostwrites a love letter for a regular customer. After his client jumps into the lake, that love letter is mistaken for a suicide note. From this incident springs the novel's morbidly fanciful premise: Mason begins writing suicide letters to pay off his drug and gambling debts to Chaz (who also happens to own a boozecan with a Batcave-like hiding room).
Through his new job, Mason meets a variety of depressives (with alliterative monikers): There's Sissy, an overweight girl neglected by her poet father; a performance artist named Soon; and a chemically castrated violent offender named Seth. And at a poker game, Mason gets cozy with a gorgeous, wheelchair-bound heroin addict named Willy - the novel's love interest.
Much like Mason, Ghosted is defined by excess. In addition to the suicide-letter narrative thread, the novel is stuffed with other plot lines, including one involving the saintly Dr. Francis, who tries to save Mason and Willy from addiction, and an overly drawn-out bit of backstory involving a tragic accident with horses. At times, the sheer abundance of characters and situations threatens to overload the reader.
On top of this, Bishop-Stall scrambles in all sorts of literary effluvium: excerpts of Mason's suicide letters, including early drafts; a journal-like "Book of Sobriety" that he keeps for Dr. Francis; a series of non sequiturs used in a mental-health questionnaire (e.g. "I've never had a favourite colour, animal, or tree"); Mason's ongoing notes on his "manuscript-in-progress"; and yet another journal kept by psychopath Seth. By implication, Ghosted is Mason's own novel, his book of insobriety, or perhaps even his own foiled attempt at a suicide note.
Bishop-Stall previously published Down to This, a non-fiction book about a year spent in Toronto's Tent City, and he writes about lowlifes and low living with confidence and rugged bravado. At their best, these passages have the hard-living lyricism found in the books of Charles Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson. At its worst, the book's romanticization of white-male vice reminds you of David Duchovny's turn as a macho-tender novelist in Californication, but done with a ponderously straight face.
The self-destructing, wannabe artist is never as interesting as he thinks himself to be. Bishop-Stall, however, plants his thumb on the scale and populates the novel with characters who are inexplicably fascinated by his protagonist; they heap praise on his prose, patiently care for him after he emerges from a drug-induced blackout and lovingly deconstruct his personality.
"Anti-hero is a lot easier than hero," Chaz says. "You're fucked up and haunted, but not by what you think you are." Even as Chaz admonishes Mason, he still feeds his self-obsession - and exacerbates the reader's growing frustration and incredulity.
Like an extended anecdote related in a tavern, the first section of Ghosted moves at its own stubbornly deliberate pace, relishing digressions and eagerly taking on complications. But Bishop-Stall dumps most of the book's meta-fictional trappings and takes a more streamlined approach in its last quarter, stitching back into place every dangling plot thread and dispatching a few genuinely surprising last-second twists.
Ghosted crackles once it stops trying to establish Mason's complexity, and instead focuses on its hardboiled, thriller-like home stretch. Pushed into action, Mason becomes the lovable anti-hero we'd been waiting for. One of the best scenes in the book has him in a poker game with literal life-and-death stakes. Instead of playing this classic scenario for laughs, Bishop-Stall grabs hold of the cliché and milks it expertly.
Ultimately, one finishes Ghosted amazed by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's ability to cram three or four novels worth of incident and characters into one book. Impressive, ambitious and exhausting, Ghosted is a novel for those who don't scare easily.
Kevin Chong is a writer in Vancouver. His most recent book is Neil Young Nation: A Quest, an Obsession (and a True Story).