Running the Light follows Billy Ray Schafer, a comedian whose career and life are collapsing, as he drives from one terrible gig to another across the American Southwest. Sam Tallent, himself a working comedian, draws on firsthand knowledge of the stand-up world's unglamorous reality to create a novel that is simultaneously funny, devastating, and addictive. Billy is broke, divorced, using drugs, and convinced that the world has failed to recognize his genius. Each club is worse than the last—audiences who don't laugh, promoters who don't pay, fellow comics who resent him. Yet Billy keeps performing because comedy is the only thing he knows how to do, and because he maintains the desperate belief that the breakthrough is still possible. Tallent writes with the rhythm and timing of stand-up, delivering dark humor that never softens the portrait of addiction and self-destruction. The novel is slim but intense, each chapter another station on Billy's descent. For readers interested in comedy, artistic failure, or addiction, Running the Light offers an unsparing look at what happens when talent isn't enough and the laughs stop coming.