Running the Light

Reviews / Votes

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 -- MEGAN NOLAN * author of ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS * Anthony Bourdain blew the lid off the psychic cesspit of restaurant backrooms with Kitchen Confidential. Now we have comedian Sam Tallent's fictional tell-all Running the Light . . . Tallent writes exceptionally well . . . 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. I did -- PETER MURPHY * IRISH TIMES * Tallent's compelling novel depicts a grim week in the life of this tragic outsider in vivid detail . . . it is not a flattering portrait. It is, however, a beautifully written one . . . A mesmerising character study of a man driving himself to oblivion: tragic, funny and unputdownable * CHORTLE * 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 * Brilliant writing . . . astounding . . . One of the best books I've read. Ever -- DOUG STANHOPE 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 * 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 * stand-up comedian * 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 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 * 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 -- DBC PIERRE * author of VERNON GOD LITTLE * 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 -- ROB DOYLE * author of THRESHOLD * 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 -- LIAS SAOUDI * co-author of TEN THOUSAND APOLOGIES * 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 -- HARRY SWORD * author of MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW * So parallel to the down-and-out-world of a DIY band touring across the pits of America written in a style evoking the life with such vividness that I was bummed out all the way through it. It's that good! -- JOEL GION * musician and author of IN THE JINGLE JANGLE JUNGLE * The obvious point of comparison is Martin Amis's Money, but relative to Tallent's gloriously depraved protagonist, John Self is strolling to a chai latte after his Pilates class -- GEOFF DYER * author of THE LAST DAYS OF ROGER FEDERER * Incredible. Best novel I've read for years. The extraordinary quality of the writing blew me away. Very special work of art * RICHARD RUSSELL *