JONAH SEES GHOSTS

The literary equivalent of a B-movie, this first novel is long on gross-out humor and short on plot and credible characters. Jonah Hart is a normal 15-year-old—except that everywhere he goes, he sees legions of ghosts. Most menacing is a dead school janitor, "obscenely fat and naked from the waist down"; most annoying are two old ladies who mock him from his living room couch. So many others plague him that he begins to develop theories: "for some reason hardware stores attracted more ghosts than other places.... Movie theaters drew more than their share." Jonah's visions are connected to the death of his alcoholic father, who ran his car off the road on his way to Jonah's sixth birthday party, "filled with several lunchtime martinis." Jonah is raised by his extremely competent film editor mother, but when he begins to be harassed by ghosts, his father returns, a gaping wound in his neck, to give him advice on life in the worlds of the living and the dead. It becomes increasingly difficult for Jonah to pretend he is normal, and when the janitor ghost beats him to a pulp, matters come to a head. By confessing to his mother and confronting the ghosts, he finally manages to free himself of his gruesome shadows. Sullivan strives for humor and pathos, and adopts a Bukowskiesque deadpan, but clunky prose ("Susan's efficiency belied the warmth of the day around her"), loopy asides ("when he flushed, six gallons of water carried his cup or so of urine out of his house and into the sewer system where it could play with the other wastes of the neighborhood") and directionless storytelling hamstring this cartoonish debut. (July)