runner

This is one crazy ride, Lee Thompson doesn’t just look down on people he gets in amongst their wretched and dysfunctional sad lives and gives them an adrenaline boost. In one bloodthirsty day in early July in the small town of Flint Michigan a number of residents will have their everyday dreams and existence interrupted and destroyed in some way. From the seemingly cosy life of Max and Isabelle to the street wise Layla and her young friend Grace with the drug crazed antics of Caleb and Lenny....nothing will ever remain the same.

They live a f***ed up life in a f***ed town and take from and abuse each other with no respect of life or consequence....”why not ride that bus into oblivion, or simply in circles around the city, because their lives offered little else in way of entertainment or meaning.”

What Lee Thompson as a writer does...he does extremely well. He likes to put his characters in extreme situations and allow the dialogue and action to develop almost dare I say with a touch of Tarantino, and by that I do not mean discussing the finer merits of a Big Kahuna Burger!

 Layla is a working girl and she looks after all types of clients, she is not there to question or criticize but to supply a service in the best and only way she can....”Blue-collar men, White-collar men. Black men. Shy men. Aggressive men. Married and unmarried. Ugly or handsome or in some ways both. Men with simple desires their wives no longer satisfied. Men with wives who no longer looked at these men with adoration, like they were conquerors. They were sad men, unhappy men, distracted men. She’d talk to them for twenty minutes after they bought her first drink, and she’d coo and purr and laugh in a girlish manner, this man, that man, pulling in his gut and grinning, telling her a story he’d told his wife a thousand times or more; a story that demonstrated he was someone other men looked up to, he was a go-getter, a man that women valued.”

This is a short novella, an adrenalin fuelled in your face look at inner city “rats” squabbling to make and keep a living...and not very successfully. Lee Thompson is an author I really enjoy who writes with a real unforgiving punch and this story is a knockout!!