Light Man

Al's a veteran who survived a VC toe popper but can't seem to avoid the emotional landmines of a relationship with the only woman who's ever loved him. Mike's a spotlight operator who can repair your TV or toaster but can't fix his broken son. Together they forge a volatile friendship and slouch toward manhood and enlightenment, fighting their own obsolescence. With "passion, authenticity, and insight" (David Evanier, Strauss's Now's the Time), along with wild humor and relentless humanity, Light Man captures the grim ironies of NYC, 1973, and shines as bright a bulb on all the lost souls currently careening toward self-destruction.

New York City, 1973 and the city is falling apart under the weight of crime and degradation. Al loves Trudy but doesn't understand her or how to be a man in this world. He hopes that angry Mike, a courageous and selfless father to a mentally crippled son, can enlighten and inspire him. But Mike, who spends his nights manning a spotlight outside Broadway theaters, has a dark side. He can keep those beams licking the dark heavens and he can fix any broken appliance you hand him, but he can't fix his broken son and it is killing him. The two men forge a friendship and try to work out their frustrations, paranoia, and rage as they grope for some standing in a city buried in uncollected garbage and uncontrolled vermin. Meanwhile, Mike's wife, Arlene, a classically trained actress, becomes a New York City folk hero portraying a distraught housewife in a television commercial trying to battle an onslaught of cockroaches. With passion, authenticity, and insight," along with wild humor and relentless humanity, Light Man digs into the psyche of a city on the edge and two men whose lopsided versions of heroism take them to the brink of catastrophe and their own contorted versions of redemption.

Larry Strauss is author of four previous novels, including Now's the Time—now an Earphone Award winning audiobook—and numerous non-fiction titles, most recently Students First and Other Lies, a collection of essays mostly about education. His short fiction has appeared in Streetlight, Extract(s), and elsewhere. Op-eds and other non-fiction have appeared in The Guardian, HuffPost, Ambassador (the inflight magazine of the now defunct Trans World Airlines), and USA Today, for which he is an opinion columnist. If you grew up in the 1980s, you might have seen some of the episodes he wrote for the first-generation Transformers cartoons.