Ghosted

Like Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown, an account of the author's undercover year in Toronto's Tent City, Bishop-Stall's debut novel breaks hearts. Emotionally damaged by childhood and adolescent traumas, druggie drifter and alcoholic gambler Mason Dubisee pushes the "Dogfather" hot dog cart in downtown Toronto during the day and sporadically tackles his stalled novel at night. Between his agonizingly described hangovers, Mason also writes suicide notes for various disturbed personalities. He falls in desperate love with Willy, a hemiplegic with a heart of gold and a heroin habit of her own, and runs afoul of a psychopathic prisoner on parole, who steals Mason's file from Mason's sometime shrink, who has serious problems of her own. Bishop-Stall's gritty, experimental style and grungy subject matter may turn off some readers, but his occasionally inchoate if conventional message about the "toughness and grace" of people who have saved one another will resonate with many. (Oct.)