Dog Soldiers (novel)

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Dog Soldiers is a 1974 novel by American novelist Robert Stone. The story revolves around journalist John Converse, Merchant Marine sailor Ray Hicks, Converse's wife Marge, and their involvement in a heroin deal gone bad.

Dog Soldiers deals, among other things, with the fall of the counterculture in America. Former Communist volunteers from the Spanish civil war now write for tabloid papers run by non-union printers. Southern California (where the majority of the novel takes place) has given way from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse seeks inspiration for his next big play as a correspondent in Vietnam, but only finds the decline of morals in himself as well as the world. Symbolic of this moral corruption is his decision to become a trafficker/dealer in heroin, which, unlike LSD, was never embraced by the 1960s counterculture.

Converse involves his friend Ray Hicks in his smuggling deal by offering to pay Hicks to hide the heroin on the Merchant Marine vessel he works on when it ships from Vietnam to California, and then to deliver the dope to Converse's wife in Los Angeles upon arrival. The novel's primary complication unfolds when Hicks arrives in California and realizes he's being followed. Unsure of whether Converse has been double-crossed by his suppliers or if Converse has himself betrayed him, Hicks elects to go on the run, taking along Converse's wife Marge, who is addicted to prescription painkillers and appears to know nothing about the deal. Hicks--a bit of a paranoid survivalist infatuated with Nietzsche and martial arts--proves a formidable escapist, and the action of the novel follows the extended pursuit of Hicks and Marge by Converse and his suppliers.

Stone also touches upon the theme of nothingness or void much as Hemingway did. Characters coming to the realization that the world consists largely of nothing and how said characters act upon this knowledge.

Very few characters in the novel show any moral fiber, all denouncing previous ideals and conviction. Dog Soldiers' takes as a primary theme the degeneration of the optimism and naivete of American youth culture at the end of the 1960s.

Stone acknowledges having borrowed heavily from his experiences among the Merry Prankster milieu led by novelist Ken Kesey, with whom Stone became acquainted while he was a student in the graduate creative writing workshops at Stanford University. The character of Ray Hicks is modeled specifically on Beat Generation icon and Merry Prankster Neal Cassady. Numerous details from the novel are based on Cassady and his exploits and the environs of Ken Kesey's home in La Honda, California, an informal commune immortalized in the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Allen Ginsberg (among others).

The book was adapted into the 1978 film Who'll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte.