Run is vintage Jack Smith. Billy Horn, a young loan collector in New York City, witnesses a mob shootout and grabs a satchel of cash tossed in his direction—the curse of materialism—which sends him running across America from mobsters who want their money back. He tries to live off the grid and dreams of his girlfriend and of freedom to study and write, but is haunted by protean types; a beefy cop, unbearably beautiful women and their menacing boyfriends, predatory matrons, and assassins dressed in black. Such figures are always there, no matter where. Smith is a master of present tense narration, inventive complications, and witty, disconcerting dialogue; and Billy’s experiences prove at once surreal and hilarious, much as Alice’s in Wonderland or K’s in The Trial.”

—DeWitt Henry, author of Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays

Jack Smith’s compelling novel Run farcically evokes the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s aphorism that “Truth is most beautiful undraped.” While reading, I was reminded of the ever-stoic Buster Keaton vainly battling to join his wife trapped inside their house that’s rotating madly in a windstorm. In the book’s opening, Smith’s everyman narrator, Billy Horn, inadvertently catches a satchel full of cash in a heist amidst exchanged gunfire and proceeds to run off with it. Paranoia-possessed that he is being trailed, Horn adopts the “principle of obscurity” by abandoning old friends and lovers and incessantly changing his living quarters throughout the country every few days, the satchel of depleting greenbacks his sole companion. “A man is never happy,” Schopenhauer says, “but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so . . . for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing.” Jack Smith risibly limns in Billy Horn the tragic-comic arc of braving an irrational world.

—Dennis Must, author of The World’s Smallest Bible, Going Dark, and Brother Carnival

With a satchel stuffed with illicit cash, Billy’s on the lam through an underworld of bus stops and seedy motels. Dangerous people want that satchel, the one thing that will lead either to Billy’s doom or survival. Darkly comic, suspenseful, this is a fast-paced tale of a desperate search for sanctuary where the walls are closing in and no one can be trusted. Like a Hitchcock film, Run blends the real and surreal, and menace comes out of the shadows, including from the shadows within. Is it the demons of the mind, or are those the real demons beating at the door?

—Robert Garner McBrearty, author of A Night at the Y, When I Can’t Sleep, and The Western Lonesome Society