Debauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father – stand-up comedian is the only title this thoroughly ruined man has left.
Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career and the addictions that travel with it, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: what happens when the opportunity doesn’t come – or worse – it comes and goes?
Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career and the addictions that travel with it, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: what happens when the opportunity doesn’t come – or worse – it comes and goes?
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Reviews
It feels unfair to compare a first-time novelist to masters like Denis Johnson and David Gates, but it's all here: despair, fury, nihilism, tenderness, lyricism, hope, dark new insight into the human condition. . . . As bleak and electrifying as anything by Cormac McCarthy
'A thrilling, nauseating and painfully real depiction of what happens as youth, talent and charisma sour, Running the Light is the best novel I've ever read about comedy, but also about a particular strand of relentless hedonism. Sam Tallent is that rare thing, a funny person who can convey his funniness in fiction and do it alongside prose that will break your heart too'
Running the Light is a majestically bleak, hilarious, and bruising tour of regret, delusion, and the detonation of the soul. In Billy Ray Schafer, Sam Tallent has created one of contemporary fiction's more memorable self-destroyers, and it's a harrowing delight to witness him evade and then perhaps finally confront his truth. If there is a comedy club in hell, and they have a merch table, this is the only book on it
You'd never expect this abomination of a man to write such beautiful prose, but Sam Tallent has done it. . . . Wow, what a book!
A gripping, raw, brutal, messy portrait of the life of an out-of-control road comic, full of drugs, booze, blood, sex, and a few jokes . . . It reads like a heightened satire of a life on the lowest tier of show business, but I'm here to tell you it all rings true
Running the Light absolutely nails the despair, futility, indignity, and perverse beauty of a life given over to stand-up comedy. The sad and the funny bleed so effortlessly into one another that you don't know whether to laugh or cry or check yourself into rehab. It ought to be required reading for every open-micer in America
Chaotic bliss . . . vivid, electric . . . reads like cinema
Brilliant writing . . . astounding . . . One of the best books I've read. Ever
Sam Tallent is one of the true originals. He's as much myth as man, like a character who wandered off the pages of a Jack Kerouac novel. But he's very real and full of real integrity that shines through in all his work