Dog Soldiers (novel)

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This article is about the 1974 novel. For other uses of Dog Soldiers, see Dog Soldiers (disambiguation).

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. The novel won the 1975 National Book Award (US) for best fiction.^[1]

Dog Soldiers deals, among other things, with the fall of the counterculture in America. Southern California (where the majority of the novel takes place) has moved on 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 traffick in heroin, which was never embraced by the 1960s counterculture the way LSD was.

Converse involves his friend Hicks in the smuggling deal. He offers 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 is 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 Marge with him, who is addicted to prescription painkillers and appears to know nothing about the deal. Hicks---a bit of a paranoid survivalist infatuated with Friedrich 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.

Dog Soldiers takes as a primary theme the degeneration of the optimism and naivete of American youth culture at the end of the 1960s. Few characters in the novel show any moral fiber, and denunciations of old ideals and convictions are common. Stone also touches upon the theme of nothingness or void much as Hemingway did, with characters coming to the realization that the world consists largely of nothing and acting upon this knowledge.

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 depicted 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.