Suicide ghostwriter

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s debut novel
Ghosted is grimly funny and terrifying

by JULIET WATERS

There’s a native legend that goes something like this: a grandfather explains to his grandson about the two sides of the soul. “It’s as though there are two wolves that are fighting in my heart.” One kind, one cruel. “Which one will win?” asks the grandson. To which the grandfather answers, “The one I feed.”

A few pages into Ghosted, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s debut novel, there’s not much question which wolf the book’s narrator, Mason, has been feeding. It’s the bad one, but there’s something about Mason that makes you sure from the start that the good wolf is in there somewhere.

Mason lives with a childhood friend Chaz who is, serendipitously (at least in this world) his drug dealer. Deeply in debt, Mason agrees to work for Chaz’s uncle Fishy at the Dogfather, “a state-of-the-art, pseudo-mafioso, hotdog-stand kind of thing.” It all seems like the stuff of another classic Canadian beautiful loser novel populated by Spadina denizens hanging out at the Matt Cohen Parkette.

And then the novel takes an unexpected and compelling turn. Mason receives a lot of money from one of his regular hot dog clients to write a love letter. The letter shows up at his client’s funeral, as a sort of suicide note in a eulogy. Mason, grief stricken but still drug driven, comes up with a brilliant money making idea: he advertises his services as a ghostwriter of suicide notes, intending to charge whatever savings the suicidal person doesn’t mind parting with.

Bit by bit, the tone of Ghosted changes, until it’s like the hot dog cart had been jacked by a character from a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Desperate as he is, you know Mason is going to end up trying to save his suicidal clients. Unless one of them, a serial killer named the Handyman, ends up killing him, or someone Mason cares about first.

Bishop-Stall, who studied creative writing at Concordia, was back in town last week to talk about Ghosted. Over lunch I got to ask him which came first, the character of Mason or the idea of the suicide note ghostwriter.

“The idea,” Bishop-Stall says emphatically. “Let’s be honest, the character is just me, debased,” he laughs. “It’s me with less coping skills.” People who’ve read his 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown, won’t find this admission surprising.

But while the premise has been called “fanciful” in some reviews, anyone who has had real experience with the suicidal will see the horrible magic of it. The last thing many suicidal people will do is call for help. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk to someone. And who better to talk to than someone who promises to help them express their darkest thoughts?

“It’s a bizarrely realistic book,” Bishop-Stall agrees. “I think it’s very hard to find somebody who hasn’t been affected by somebody else taking their own life… To me it’s the epitome of terror. It just suggests so many miles and miles of pain and terror that have been going on so long. The other thing that scares me is someone who is able to hurt another person without remorse. So I wrote the two different things that scared me the most into this book.”

It’s a tricky balance, grimly funny, terrifying and tender. “What you don’t want to do is write about something that causes such profound pain in the world in a gimmicky way. And when people say, ‘Oh it’s a funny book about suicide,’ it’s very easy to assume it’s going to be glib.”

It isn’t. And it might be worth pointing out that Bishop-Stall’s life these days seems to be filled with its fair share of hope. Once the book tour is over, he returns to his apartment on the corner of College and Spadina to continue raising his three-month-old son Zev, which, in Hebrew, means wolf.

GHOSTED BY SHAUGHNESSY
BISHOP-STALL, RANDOM HOUSE,
HC, 389 PP., $32