Running the Light

Running the LightBy: Sam Tallent 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,

By: Sam Tallent     

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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.