Award-winning Toronto journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has turned his hand to fiction with his first novel, Ghosted. (Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall/Random House)

There’s suffering for one’s art, and then there’s Mason Dubisee, whose art relies on the suffering of others.

Mason ghostwrites suicide notes, putting the final thoughts of the doomed down on paper for a fee. That’s when he’s not selling hot dogs. Or getting high and drunk and gambling away his earnings. Or when he isn’t trying to dry out with the help of a sympathetic doctor who asks him to keep a journal called The Book of Sobriety.

'I spent a lot of time creating the worst person I could think of, a human being so corrupted in soul and spirit and as close to evil as I could figure out.'

— Novelist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

This fallen hero is the creation of Toronto writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, who is sitting, red-eyed, in a small, windowless room at his publisher’s office, hands jammed into the pockets of his peacoat. It’s the first media interview for his debut novel, Ghosted, and he apologizes for his exhaustion. He’s just had a child, and the 35-year-old author says that he was in so much denial about becoming a father that he crammed the final edits of the novel, a freelance assignment and the marking for two courses he taught into the month of his son’s birth.

“Before he came, I was trying to finish the book,” Bishop-Stall says, “and I thought, 'The kid is going to read this.' Which was pretty strange. I have a friend who used to remind me to write as though my mother was dead. But my mother is really open and wonderful. I don’t feel constrained by her judgment. So it’s weird now to worry about the judgment coming from the future and what my son might think of the book.”

With its scenes of Charles Bukowski-esque excess and its mystery-thriller second half — which involves Mason’s creepy cat-and-mouse game with a violent psychopath named Seth — Ghosted won’t be on the baby’s reading list anytime soon. There are parts of the book that Bishop-Stall himself doesn’t like to read and found difficult to write.

"I spent a lot of time creating the worst person I could think of, a human being so corrupted in soul and spirit and as close to evil as I could figure out,” he says about the character of Seth. “I created something so ugly because I wanted to show that ugliness, but I don’t want to be confused with that ugliness.”

(Random House of Canada)

Bishop-Stall is intimately familiar with the dark corners of Toronto that the characters of Ghosted inhabit. He lives in the same neighbourhood as Mason – the mash-up of vegetable stands, thrift shops, flophouses and condos known as Kensington Market. Nine years ago, Bishop-Stall squatted in Tent City, a community of addicts, prostitutes and homeless people along the city’s eastern industrial waterfront. He documented the experience in the 2004 book Down To This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown, which was published internationally and won several awards.

“My introduction to Toronto was living on the edge of it for a year,” he says. “I didn’t know the city. I grew up in Vancouver and went to school in Montreal, so I hated Toronto for a long time without really knowing why. But I decided to stay in Toronto after Tent City. It was like moving to a city from the sewers up. I don’t see Toronto the Good. For me, it’s the opposite. I know what goes on at night and in the backrooms of stores and what you can buy and what people really get up to.” Bishop-Stall acknowledges that there’s a little of him in Mason, a writer whose self-destructive streak dovetails with his creative impulse.

“Sitting in a room by yourself all day trying to write a book is a dangerous job. You use whatever works to keep you in that room. Sometimes alcohol or drugs make it easier. Sometimes you get to a point where you can’t do it without it. I think most writers struggle with that dynamic. I definitely have.”

Given that Ghosted dwells on the subject of suicide, Bishop-Stall is careful to distinguish between overindulgence and the desire to end your own life. He says he was frustrated after hearing a glib radio story about former child star Corey Haim’s death. “The host said it was ‘an accidental overdose – whatever that means.’ But there is a distinction between people who die from taking too many drugs and people who die on purpose from taking too many drugs.

“To wilfully want to kill yourself is a specific and debilitating kind of hell. To be a drug addict is a different, specific and debilitating kind of hell. You can do things that are dangerous and harming and still want to be alive.”

For Mason, it comes down to deciding not just whether he wants to live, but how. The stakes get higher when he falls in love with Willy, a pretty heroin addict who uses a wheelchair, and when he gets drawn more deeply into the lives of his suicidal clients. Even as it twists darker and scarier to its adrenalin-pumped conclusion, Ghosted is leavened by the possibility of redemption.

“It’s an almost Hollywood idea,” Bishop-Stall says, “but there’s a roundabout way to address what you’ve been doing to self-destruct. Often, the only way we can figure out how to save ourselves is by saving someone else.”

Ghosted is in stores now.

Rachel Giese is a writer based in Toronto.