Paper Ghosts

Disillusioned with the pop culture notoriety he turned into a lucrative career, Luke Sullivan abandons the blogs of the big city and discovers the agonies and ecstasies of rural America in Mike Restaino’s PAPER GHOSTS. Channeling whatever authorial alchemy he can muster, Luke strives to write his own version of the great American novel - that is, when he’s not wrestling chipmunks, drinking too much, and falling in love with a Romanian beauty who may or may not speak English. Haunting, absurd, and deviously comic, PAPER GHOSTS is a goofball odyssey into obsession and the desperate crusade for personal reinvention that is equal parts literary scavenger hunt and bookworm vision quest.

As PAPER GHOSTS begins, the Dweeb King, a well-known pop culture television personality, maxes out whatever credibility he has left and waves goodbye to the wall-to-wall nerdery of his urban life, exchanging it for the bucolic mysteries of Deer Meadow, West Virginia. Alone and surrounded by nature, Luke finally runs out of excuses to avoid working on the book he so confidently believes he has inside him. Writer’s block hits just before the snow starts to fall, but that’s the least of Luke’s worries. What he thought would be a sleepy, quiet town turns out to be populated by an aggressive bartender prone to outbursts of vulgar profanity, a neighbor who believes Luke is a serial killer with a habit of digging holes in his backyard for no reason, and a contingent of rowdy Romanians who claim to work at a nearby casino. And what are these paper ghosts? They could be the classic novels Luke surrounds himself with in hopes of streamlining his artistic intake, an effort to rid his world of mundane claptrap. He also claims his rented cabin is haunted, but that phantom only shows up when Luke drinks too much, which happens more and more frequently as winter wears on. The chipmunks scratching at his walls, though - those little jerks are real. Aren’t they? Do you hear them, too?

Mike Restaino is an author and filmmaker. His award-winning movie BETTER THAN CRAZY was released in 2015. He is a graduate of The University of California, Berkeley and The University of Southern California. He lives in Incline Village, NV. This is his first book.