Without the words "fuck," "nigger," and "gun," there wouldn't be much to Run, a tiresome exercise in cynical machismo. Horror-anthology editor Douglas Winter's first novel pants breathlessly through an urban nightmare of white gunrunners and black gangs, regurgitating social stereotypes and cinematic clichés with equally bloody determination, only to exhaust itself on the uplifting but obvious message that death is bad and life is better. Protagonist Burdon Lane pounds his way through Run with ruthless, robotic efficiency, trying to escape the aftermath of a conspiracy that turned his multimillion-dollar guns-for-bearer-bonds milk run into a politically motivated bloodbath. For all his experience and basic animal cunning, he can't get ahead of his shadowy adversaries, who find him everywhere he runs, converting his friends into corpses or strangers. Winter's artificial, mouthy characters and his loving descriptions of guns, bullets, and their effects on the human body all inevitably recall Quentin Tarantino, but his conscious devotion to construction tricks and stilted, nervy paranoia borrow equally from Hitchcock, as well. His lurching combination of staccato dialect and paragraph-long run-on sentences is surprisingly compelling, almost hypnotic, making it easy to fall into Winter's gritty rhythms and only realize briefly, upon coming up for air, that his foundation rests on stale popcorn and sticky floors. Lane makes a point of sneeringly dismissing urban "caper movies," but Winter's story fits neatly into the genre: It demonizes both blacks and whites en masse for greater dramatic effect, most of the kinks in its twisted plot inevitably lead to massive firefights, and for those who can keep their brains in neutral throughout, it's a pretty thrilling ride, at least until the lights come up at the end.