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Where Gods Gamble: a Tale of American Mythology
by C. Bradford Eastland
Price: $7.50
ISBN: 1-932482-26-1

Most so-called epic novels are the stuff of motion picture blockbusters: classic love stories woven into sweeping historical dramas, diabolical villains whose evil can scarcely be comprehended, great battles with swords and cannons and gigantic armies colliding upon endless flat plains of death. All very theatrical.

But in the real world, for most people, the greatest battles of their lives are the ones fought inside their own heads. And the villains are creatures at once self-created and self-nurtured.

This is the battleground for Where Gods Gamble:a Tale of American Mythology, a flamboyant, free-galloping masterwork of American fiction by C. Bradford Eastland.

Meet Charlie Barnes. Age 24. Bright, college educated, talented, good-looking. And a failure. He certainly has the right to think so, having just returned to Los Angeles from a disastrous two-year journey across the United States and back again, two more years of quitting and failing. He is a man beyond disillusioned. But at least he's back home. Time to give it one last shot. He's at the end of his rope. Time to triumph over, or submit to, the irresistible Furies raging within.

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian Hostage Crisis and colored by some brilliantly rendered panoramas of L.A.’s fabled Santa Anita Racetrack, Where Gods Gamble is Eastland's emotional, personal dance through the heart, mind, history, hope, and failed promise of America. The author pulls no punches regarding the lies our nation tells us right from the cradle. His reluctant hero, young Barnes, is a typical, willing victim of these manufactured myths, these cabals designed to support the status quo. Will he pursue the depressing false security of a “regular” 9-to-5 job? Will he select the far more difficult (yet infinitely more fulfilling) career of a professional gambler? Or will he succumb to his own internal demons trying to sort it all out….

BOSON BOOKS also publishes The Basketball Expatriate by Mr. Eastland. We offer his short stories The Dole and Welcome to Miss Ida Parrot's Bed and Breakfast on our Freebies page.

About the Author


C. Bradford Eastland was born in 1955, in the quintessential small town of Washington, Iowa, USA. Population 5,000, give or take. The Eastland family moved to Southern California in 1964, without the nine-year-old’s consent, and indeed much of his later fiction would spring from the violent collision on the palette of his experience of these two vastly dissimilar regions. After graduating in 1977 from UC Berkeley he returned to the Los Angeles area, enduring a variety of “regular” jobs to support himself while he worked nights on the four novels and two dozen short-stories he has completed to date.

Mr. Eastland and family currently make their home in Sierra Madre, near Los Angeles, a village not much bigger than the very one in which he was born (except, of course, that the surrounding county happens to include an extra fifteen million people). They live in a century-old, two-story wooden cottage quite out of place in L.A.’s endless sea of stucco and Spanish tile; one more reminder of the beloved Midwest he has never forgotten and never asked to leave.

When his 8-year-old son Rob is old enough, the author plans to tell him about Where Gods Gamble.  He will tell him what it is about and how long it took and why it is important to him. He probably will not tell him that it is the Great American Novel.  He will, however, tell him that it did turn out to be pretty much exactly what he always imagined, in his dreams, the great American ‘epic’ novel would look like….