Riding Shotgun Into The Promised Land

Riding Shotgun Into The Promised Land
Written by John Lloyd Purdy

List price: $12.95 US 5.25" x 8", 232 pages ISBN: 978-0981591414 Fiction “Riding Shotgun is powered by quirky characters whose actions reveal the odd twists and turns of the American character in the latter 20th century, and today.”  Riding Shotgun Into The Promised Land follows a returning war veteran as he tries to reintegrate into family and friends, but instead finds himself on a journey over the blue highways that trace the course of the Oregon Trail. In the hundred and fifty years since tens of thousands traveled the route looking for a new start, the land and people have changed, and the folks he encounters—from genetic engineers to militia members, Native Americans to New Age gurus—mark that change, but also reveal a core good will hidden in unexpected places.    Coming home from a war is no easy matter, and if you are an inherently unlucky individual like the protagonist, it gets even more complicated. No longer interested in the things that still center his friends, he walks away from job and home looking for warmth and some vague idea of connections, only to fall into a series of events that spiral out of his control and sends him on a journey back across the Oregon Trail in modern times, looking for home. Attempting to act as a responsible citizen in the era of global warming, he accidentally kills a scientist; escaping the scene, he falls in with a truck driver who is also a gun runner for an anti-government militia; spending his last dollars for a good meal and night’s lodging, he accepts a ride from a college co-ed financing her education through prostitution; looking for work, he is befriended by a family of Native Americans and given a job that provides him the time and insight necessary to reinvent himself. There is more: failed towns, racist possees murdering immigrants, and an itinerant New Age guru hopping from meeting to meeting in his BMW along this well worn, mythic trail.