Growing up, Mason Dubisee had a hundred future selves: Jedi. Cowboy. Jedi-cowboy, explorer, rock star, Sandinista-Gandhi-Hemingway-Indiana-Jones type thing. But at thirty, he must finally face the truth: He’s a drug-addled drifter, an aspiring novelist unable to move beyond lists of titles and themes.

Desperate, he takes a job as “The Dogfather”—a downtown hot dog vendor. When a mysterious customer hires him to write a very personal letter, he stumbles into a shadow career, ghostwriting suicide notes for the despondent. The gig helps cover his gambling debts but takes an emotional toll. The trouble is, Mason is hardwired to rescue people, and no one needs rescuing more than the suicidal. Except maybe Willy, the heroin-smoking beauty he’s falling for.

What happens when someone wrestling with his own demons immerses himself in other people’s tragedies? Quite a lot: A hotdog cart is totaled, a convict sprung, a funeral faked, a head scalped, a horse stolen. As Mason’s professional and personal lives become entangled, his sanity is tested—as is the line between suicide and murder.

Ghosted is a gritty literary thriller, a black comedy, a high-stakes poker caper, an urban cowboy adventure, and a love story. Bishop-Stall plunges fearlessly into the perilous terrain of drugs, love, and death in this ambitious debut.

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall left Vancouver at seventeen to hitchhike to Costa Rica. After teaching English, painting houses, and picking olives in Mexico, Italy, and Spain, he worked as an actor and journalist and currently teaches writing at the University of Toronto. His book Down to This chronicles his year living with the homeless in the continent’s largest shantytown. He lives in Toronto.

It is hard to control a motorcycle with one good leg and one good arm while overdosing on methadone, especially in the fog. And it’s a strange sensation: the chemicals shutting you down, slowing your heart rate, your breathing, your circulation, even as the darkening world speeds past you, faster and faster. You are pulled in two directions: downward by gravity, narcosis and death—forward by velocity, necessity and death . . .
An unexpected turn. The back tire slips out, and now the ground is gone. That slow flying, the endless skid, the airborne descent. Mason feels the wind through his hair. “Oh God,” he thinks. “I was trying to do something!”
. . . As Mason’s newfound luck would have it, he’d crashed near the Sherbourne Shelter. It took him a moment to get his bearings. He staggered up the street, around the corner, into the alley—and then he saw it: the glow of a crack pipe through the fog.
Mason called out: “Hey Wilf!”
“Who’s that?”
He staggered towards them. “Hey Wilf! Hey guys!”
“Stop yer yammering!”
“Who the hell is that?”
“It’s me,” said Mason. “Frannie’s friend. I need some crack.”
They flipped a lighter to take a look.
It might have been the arm hanging four inches too low, or the blood-spattered hospital duds tucked into his cowboy boots, or just the look in Mason’s eyes—whatever it was they all agreed: the man needed some crack.
With each toke Mason grew stronger. And although the fog remained, the life-crushing darkness started to lift. His heartbeat, barely a waltz, began to quicken. His lungs expanded with cocaine breath. Blood rushed through his veins—from head to heart to liver to legs. And then he was off.