Mason Dubisee, who has just turned 30, is struggling to churn out a novel as he battles his gambling and cocaine addictions. After his childhood friend and drug dealer, Chaz, finds him an apartment and a job selling hot dogs in Toronto, one of Mason’s lunchtime customers commissions him to write a love letter that later turns out to be a suicide note. This prompts Mason to seek out work as a suicide-note writer. He feels guilty about this occupation, spending long nights at Chaz’s illegal bar, The Cave, where he meets and slowly falls in love with Willy, a beautiful young hemiplegic woman addicted to heroin. As their romance develops, Mason becomes increasingly aware that crafting a suicide note for his latest customer, a recent ex-con, will be more dangerous than he bargained for. This somewhat sophomoric novel becomes increasingly more suspenseful as Mason struggles to save the lives of those closest to him and as he seeks out redemption for his former sins. An adventurous, wild page-turner of a debut from Canadian author Bishop-Stall. --Julie Hunt
Description:
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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From Booklist
Mason Dubisee, who has just turned 30, is struggling to churn out a novel as he battles his gambling and cocaine addictions. After his childhood friend and drug dealer, Chaz, finds him an apartment and a job selling hot dogs in Toronto, one of Mason’s lunchtime customers commissions him to write a love letter that later turns out to be a suicide note. This prompts Mason to seek out work as a suicide-note writer. He feels guilty about this occupation, spending long nights at Chaz’s illegal bar, The Cave, where he meets and slowly falls in love with Willy, a beautiful young hemiplegic woman addicted to heroin. As their romance develops, Mason becomes increasingly aware that crafting a suicide note for his latest customer, a recent ex-con, will be more dangerous than he bargained for. This somewhat sophomoric novel becomes increasingly more suspenseful as Mason struggles to save the lives of those closest to him and as he seeks out redemption for his former sins. An adventurous, wild page-turner of a debut from Canadian author Bishop-Stall. --Julie Hunt