Dog Soldiers

In 1967 Robert Stone was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. His second book is a stunning fulfillment of that early promise, and places Stone squarely in the ranks of major American fiction writers. Again, he explores the dark side of the American Dream, this time with even greater power and brilliance.

In this novel, every character is a renegade, a "dog soldier," but none escapes. One, John Converse, starts a deal with drugs that takes his friend Hicks to California where he makes a connection with Marge, Converse's wife. Their chase across the American landscape with the cache of heroin is a descent into the hell of idle dreams and empty refuges that characterizes a nation's painful search for meaning.

In an alienated world, where drugs are a leitmotif, where federal agents deal in dope, and old people bide their time by the flickering TV, Stone's characters make small gestures of love and loyalty toward each other. Some of them survive, but at great cost.

This shattering book captures perfectly the characters' wry and comic sense of their own fate. Readers will not be able to ignore Stone's sweeping vision of our predicament.