Radio Eldorado

Set during the tumultuous end of The Sixties, Radio Eldorado is a darkly comic and rousing portrait of an extended family of outsiders split by the counterculture movement and living in the cowboy-haunted and atomic American West.

While on an American concert tour, The Wound Tights, featuring the married couple Mack Taitt and Gladys Wund, stay at the Wund family farm in Eldorado Springs, a small town in the Colorado Rockies, where Mack romanticizes the Wild West, fancying himself a New Age cowboy and Gladys mourns the recent death of her mother. After fighting the infamous “Mother’s Day Fire” at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, Gladys’s father is left injured and traumatized, forcing the band to delay their tour.

Mack and Gladys form an allegiance with Cynthia Hutton, a peace activist turned Weathermen member, and their lives become inextricably linked. A bombing, a pregnancy, and a death violently engulf Mack, Gladys and Cynthia, forcing them to question love, family, and revolution, and leading them to the promise—or the disillusionment—of the mythic Eldorado.

Populated with a bizarre cast of characters—commune dwellers, Cold War soldiers, forlorn ranchers, pirate radio operators, and an elderly missionary become buckaroo-capitalist—and told with the excesses of an Acid Western, Radio Eldorado examines American hope, dread, and uncertainty in an age of social upheaval.

(contact the author for more information)

Our Love Stories Are Ghost Stories has been short-listed for The Flannery O'Connor Award, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the Tartt First Fiction Award.