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>