Running the Light - by Sam Tallent (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A bona fide "instant classic" (Doug Stanhope) novel that tells the story of a road comic crashing and burning by acclaimed comedian Sam Tallent

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.

Review Quotes

"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."--Marc Maron, stand-up comedian and podcaster

"You'd never expect this abomination of a man to write such beautiful prose, but Sam Tallent has done it. . . . Wow, what a book!"--Shane Gillis, stand-up comedian

"Chaotic bliss . . . vivid, electric . . . reads like cinema."--The Denver Post

"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."--Chris Gethard

"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 Lipsyte, author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

"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."--Adam Cayton-Holland, author of Tragedy + Time

"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."--Mishka Shubaly, author of The Long Run

"A thrilling, nauseating and painfully real depiction of what happens at length 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."--Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

About the Author

Sam Tallent is a comedian, novelist, and host of the Chubby Behemoth podcast. For the last decade, he has performed more than forty-five weekends per year in North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Sam has two comedy specials: Waiting For Death to Claim Us and The Toad's Morale. He also has a travel show, Wide World, on YouTube. He lives in Detroit and cooks dinner for his wife every night.