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….