Running the Light

<p><b>''THE BEST NOVEL I''VE EVER READ ABOUT COMEDY'' Megan Nolan</b><br><b>''GLORIOUSLY DEPRAVED'' Geoff Dyer<br></b><b>''LIT UP MY PLEASURE CENTRES AND LEFT ME STUNNED'' Rob Doyle</b><br><b><br>''<i>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...</i>''</b><br><br>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, he travels from hell gig to hell gig across the American Southwest in search of a reason to keep living. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray is the answer to a tragic question: What happens when opportunity never arrives? Or - worse - when it comes and goes?<br><br>''<b>Exceptional . . . Running the Light is Dante as gag artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep''</b><br><b><i>IRISH TIMES</i></b><br><br><b>''Nothing I''ve read hits the psycho-chemical abyss of road life turned horribly wrong quite like this'' LIAS SAOUDI</b></p>