Known for his bestselling novels exploring the roles of entertainment and popular culture in historical America, he has also published a critically acclaimed memoir and worked extensively in a broad range of media, including comics, television and podcasting.

Relocated to San Francisco, he grew up in a milieu of 70s-era Bohemianism "by the side of his increasingly erratic mother, among con men and get-rich schemes.

Along the way he encounters many historical figures, including fellow magicians Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston, United States President Warren G. Harding, BMW founder Max Friz, the Marx Brothers, business magnate Francis Marion "Borax" Smith, the inventor of electronic television Philo Farnsworth, and San Franciscan madams Tessie Wall and Jessie Hayman.

[10][11] Once again interweaving real historical figures and events into a tapestry of fiction, the novel begins in 1916, when a mass delusion results in no less than eight hundred sightings of Charlie Chaplin, appearing simultaneously at various locations throughout the world.

It then traces the life and career of Chaplin himself, while "we are introduced to a dazzling cast of characters that take us from the battlefields of France to the Russian Revolution and from the budding glamour of Hollywood to madcap Wild West shows.".

[18] Entitled "The Tender, Flaky Taste of Weltschmerz", the story enlists Howard the Duck in an affectionate send-up of advertisements for Hostess Fruit Pies, once ubiquitous in Marvel comics ("a delight in every bite").

Gold was a voracious reader of comics "when I was a kid in the 1970s"[19] but had moved on to reading science fiction as well as the works of Robertson Davies and John Irving by the age of thirteen.

In 2015, the exhibit Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby, presented at California State University, Northridge, commissioned Gold to contribute an essay as well.

"He did it with the same hands that drew Captain America and Thor...in fact, he was wrestling with such deep nuances about the intermingled natures of good and evil that they're only comprehensible when viewed through the effects of wartime experience.