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Mark J. Sullivan, III
Author of Jonah Sees Ghosts
Mark J. Sullivan, III is a writer and a musician. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two sons.
Jonah Sees Ghosts is a touching, and humorous first novel. It combines magical realism with a tale of how alcohol abuse shapes the personalities within a family. It tells the story of fifteen-year-old Jonah Hart, a boy with a problem he's afraid to share. Not only does he see ghosts, but when he dreams at night, he can also leave his body and travel in the ether -- a compellingly addictive form of retreat.
We asked Mark a few questions about his book and writing:
What made you want to write this book?
It's hard to say, writing is a compulsion, it just started happening. I started Jonah 13 years ago. I had written short stories prior to Jonah and figured a novel was really the momentum caused by multiple short stories. Actually, Jonah was written during my starving artist phase in life, when I ate brown rice and scallions. It was a good life.
How did the ghosts become an integral part of Jonah's story?
The ghost characters were not included in the first draft of the book and there were things I was trying to say but they just weren't coming through. The ghosts are basically Jonah's insecurities externalized.
What message were you trying to communicate through Jonah?
The crises we experience in life don't require action, they instead require decision. It is an act of immaturity to think that decisions we make have an impact right away. But we try to control things, anyway. Trying to make things play out the way we want them to. Jonah's decision is different: he says good-bye to the ghost of his father. It isn't a controlling act. It's an act of faith, faith that things will work out without forcing it to be okay. When I let go life always turns out better than I ever could have imagined.
Excerpts From Reviews:
"In Jonah Sees Ghosts, Mark Sullivan takes a 'lover's quarrel with the world' into the beyond. Beset with the visions of a Bosch, and the honesty of a Henry Miller, his young protagonist faces the twenty-first century in bewilderment. Jonah, with the heart of a transcendentalist, travels out of body in a spirit world full of meanies and walking corpses and brings a report of redemption back to the land of the living. With the invention of this anti-hero all his own, Sullivan leaves us wiser in our admiration for his remarkable first novel."
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John Rolfe Gardiner, author of Great Dream from Heaven
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"Mark Sullivan writes with beautiful, introspective clarity. In young Jonah, he captures perfectly the conviction of perception that only the young have."
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Henry Rollins
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