Bishop-Stall’s Ghosted is a grim yet funny tale

While my bank account doesn’t always agree, I must say it is a great thing to have someone at the local book store who knows my tastes. You walk in, converse for a moment as you are led around the store, and leave with your wallet lighter and your bookshelves bowed.

My last trip to Prairie Lights in Iowa City found Paul excited about several books, including Ghosted, the debut novel from Canadian journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. He pulled the book from crime and mystery section (always a good sign) and told me as he pressed it into my hands that he thought I’d like it.

I had (as always) a formidable reading stack, but time was of the essence. If I enjoyed the book as much as Paul expected, I had agreed to host Bishop-Stall’s reading two weeks hence. So, I added it to the stack of books I started that night. While I made good headway into all four, Ghosted is the one that I reached for most often, and the one I finished first. The first 70 pages sucked me in, and despite twists and turns that took it in several unexpected directions, I found it difficult to put down.

The book tells of Mason Dubisee, a 30-year-old drug-addled drifter who may list “writer” on his tax forms, but who hasn’t written anything more than cryptic notes for an eternally gestating novel in quite some time. He is starting pretty close to the bottom, but in the grand tradition of noir protagonists, there is nowhere for Mason to go but down. It is while working as a vendor at a “Godfather”-inspired hotdog stand that he hits upon a job that will help deliver him to the bottom: ghostwriter for suicide notes.

Along the way he meets a handful of people looking to end their lives, people who, in truth, are in a better place than Mason. Dealing with people in such dire straits has the expected effect, dragging Mason into untenable situations driven by drugs, drink, gambling and the breaking of a few laws.

About halfway through, the book takes a darker turn in to thriller territory, as Mason comes face-to-face with pure evil at the same time he finally finds something he doesn’t want to lose: the love of a good – though paralyzed and drug-addicted – woman.

All of this would be unbearable were it not for Bishop-Stall’s ability to leaven the darkness with sharp wit and gonzo action. The author knows from grit – his previous book, Down to This, chronicles a year living in Toronto’s Tent City – but he uses it just as often in the service of wackiness as he does chronicling despair.

Bishop-Stall is on tour in support of Ghosted right now, and any fans of crime fiction or noir would be doing themselves a service by checking him out. He just lost his U.S. publisher (Soft Skull put the book out here this fall), so he can use a little help getting the word out about this fascinating book.

Nov. 11, 7 p.m. at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.

Nov. 15, 7 p.m.  at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m. at The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco

Nov. 22, 7:30 p.m. at Powell’s Books, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Ore.

TIRBD: Did the idea for Ghosted evolve out of the work you did for Down to This?

SBS: I would say, not so much. There are some similar themes of addiction and desperation. And there was one suicide in Tent City that affected me a fair bit, but that year was not consciously present in my mind as I was writing Ghosted. The only section that is very much informed by my time in Tent City is the passage on page 272 about “the war being with them.”

What was the first element to the story when you conceived it, and did that lead you in the direction the book eventually took?

All I had at the start was the premise: a man who ghostwrites suicide letters for other people. By necessity I knew it would have to be dark and hopefully darkly humorous, but I had no elements of character or narrative, at the outset.

In some ways this feels like two books, with a lighter tone at the beginning and a much darker one in the latter half. Was that a conscious shift, or just something dictated by the story’s progression?

It was not so much a conscious shift, more one dictated by the story arc, which I then embraced wholly. To me it is the movement of most things in life, from absurd to scary. And I also know they’re the two hardest things to do as a writer: to be genuinely funny and genuinely scary, so I tried to be one, and then the other, and hopefully sometimes a bit of both.

There is an interesting bit of relativism at work in the story, with the people Mason helps often seeming more with it than he is. Was that a commentary, intentional or otherwise, on our self-help, self-medicated culture?

I dunno, but it sounds good when you say it.

How did you bring your work as a journalist to this project? Was it difficult to write fiction where you had written non-fiction for so long?

Most of my journalism has been intensely immersive, experiential, whatever you want to call it. And in some ways I was experiencing some of what Mason experiences in the story – we have similarities, he and I, so there is that parallel. But really, writing non-fiction is a much different animal for me. It is much easier, because there are fewer choices to make. With writing fiction, I find it is very easy to become paralyzed by the overwhelming abundance of possibility – the fact that anything can happen at any moment. You are constantly having to limit yourself, which is something I’m not very good at.

Writing is a big part of the story, obviously. Did Mason’s notes about the book he was writing evolve out of your own about this book? Did Mason’s troubles mirror your own?

I guess so. In general, Mason is born out of my greatest faults, inabilities. My great hope is that I deal with my problems, both in writing and in life, better than he does.