‘Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight.‘
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 in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father – comedian is the only title Schafer has left.
Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn’t come – or worse – it comes and goes?
‘In vivid, electric sentences that read like cinematic tracking shots,’ (Denver Post) Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man’s life as we search for the mercy he does not want.
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 in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father – comedian is the only title Schafer has left.
Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn’t come – or worse – it comes and goes?
‘In vivid, electric sentences that read like cinematic tracking shots,’ (Denver Post) Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man’s life as we search for the mercy he does not want.
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Reviews
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
You'd never expect this abomination of a man to write such beautiful prose, but Sam Tallent has done it. . . . Wow, what a book!
'Nothing I've read hits the psycho-chemical abyss of road life turned horribly wrong quite like this. What a relief to fall in love with a total bastard of a protagonist again. Heartache and disgust in equal measure. Pure style the whole way. Essential reading'
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
Brilliant writing . . . astounding . . . One of the best books I've read. Ever
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
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
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
I struggle to name a more lucid, compelling trawl through modern hell since David Gates's Jernigan, thirty-sum years ago. Sam Tallent's exploration of a working week at the human border where darkness spawns comedy is as bright as organs in a jar, so well expressed you can taste the drugs and blood. Anyone wondering where The Great American Novel went: this is it on bail'
'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'
'With Running the Light, Sam Tallent has pulled off a feat of greatness that lit up my pleasure centres and left me stunned. A riot of narrative energy, stylistic force, quick perception, and raw, red-eyed masculine id, it's at once an unforgettable and moving character portrait, and a scorching vision of ecstatic self-annihilation'
'A devastatingly sad, utterly debauched, frequently hilarious descent into the seedy, low-lit, cocaine and bottom shelf booze-fuelled American stand up circuit. Tallent has written one of the finest American road novels but he's also opened a portal. His is a world you can taste: the chemical afterburn, stagnant burger grease and morning after whisky; the regret, endless road and fleeting moments of grace. Astonishing'
Chaotic bliss . . . vivid, electric . . . reads like cinema