“These books tell nightmarish tales. Horrible things keep happening. You think things can’t get worse, but then you turn the page and they do. I consider Volk to be a master of dialogue. It always rings true.” – Bill McCloud, The Vietnam Veteran magazine’s Books in Review
Destiny Returns (Danjon Press, 415 pp. $14.99, paperback; $3.99, Kindle) is the third novel in The Morpheus Series by Douglas Volk. These books get under my skin and find a home in the part of my brain that responds to terror. Volk is a very seductive storyteller.
This time we’re dealing with kinky sex, blackmail, fraud, embezzlement, and contract murder. All that is held together by The Curse, which we first encounter at the beginning of the first book in this series, The Morpheus Conspiracy. The Curse comes about following a mysterious, brutal incident that took place in South Vietnam involving an American soldier and Vietnamese civilians in late 1970. Volk describes it vividly in The Morpheus Conspiracy, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my head. The Curse expresses itself through Somnambulistic Telepathy, which gives people the ability to travel into other people’s dreams and carry out acts of violence against them.
This book begins twenty years after the previous one—The Surgeon’s Curse —ended. It’s 2006 and Chicago is dealing with hundreds of murders, most of them involving street gangs. Charlotte “Charly” Becker has been a cop for five years, but is a rookie detective assigned to homicide, a department known as “the flying shit storm.” Her father is retired from the same department and had a reputation as a brilliant detective.
The first case she’s assigned to take the lead on involves the murder of a dominatrix, apparently at the hands of a professional gunman. But, of course, nothing’s ever as simple as it seems. Hoyt Rogers—one of the main partners in a large law firm and a longtime city councilman—is a client of the murdered woman. Charly Becker finds out he has serious money troubles. Not to mention being the brother of a notorious mass murderer known as The Surgeon.
As Rogers’ troubles worsen, his appearance goes through big changes and his personal hygiene goes downhill as his mental state deteriorates. It seems The Curse is back and the horror is about to begin all over again. At the same time, Detective Becker has to deal with pressure from the department to solve the murder, along with political complications because of Rogers’ position with the city, and a reporter who keeps pestering her for details about the case.
These books tell nightmarish tales. Horrible things keep happening. You think things can’t get worse, but then you turn the page and they do. I consider Volk to be a master of dialogue. It always rings true.
I encourage readers to start with the first book in the series and read your way through. That will give you a better sense of the overall vibe that’s going on here—the malevolence that underlies everything.
This book is popular entertainment, one that can help us get through these stressful pandemic days.
–Bill McCloud
Douglas Volk’s novel, The Morpheus Conspiracy (DanJon Publications, 470 pp. $14.99, paper; $3.99, Kindle), is a great work of terrifying horror and unrelenting suspense. As I read it, I kept waiting to see if the story was going to fall apart. It never did.
The book begins with a mysterious incident that takes place in South Vietnam in late 1970. The story then moves to Atlanta and Boston during the months of the Watergate scandal.
After coming home, the main character David Collier literally wears his Vietnam War experience on his face. Massively disfigured in a fire during the war, he grows his hair long to conceal that part of his face, except for times when he chooses to reveal it. With an eye that never closes because the lid was burned away, he is reminded of what he went through every time he looks in a mirror. And he becomes driven by feelings of betrayal.
Collier believes he was betrayed by the Army, by his nation, and by his girlfriend who ended their relationship when he came home from Vietnam. Laura Resnick has her own reasons for splitting from him, but Collier is sure it’s because of what happened to his face.
Collier dreams about getting back at her, and it turns out that he seems to have the ability to cause her to have horrendous nightmares. And not just her, because he can also enter the dreams of other people he believes have offended him and bring harm to them.
Other characters include a VA doctor and a scientist with an interest in sleep disorders. They are ultimately brought together with Collier and Resnick in a story written in such a way that you can almost see and feel four solid walls closing in on them. Though much of the story takes place in a broad and wide dreamscape, it’s ultimately a very claustrophobic tale.
Frequently while reading. I found myself picturing the text in images like you would see in a graphic novel. I mean it as a compliment when I say this book would make a great graphic novel.
The Morpheus Conspiracy can be read on a few different levels: as entertainment, as psychological drama, and as an example—though greatly exaggerated—of what the Vietnam War did to the nation and to many of us who served in it.
Douglas Volk
My favorite quote from the book is when Collier recalls a buddy who died in front of him: “He was history. He was the history of the Vietnam War.” What a great way to commemorate each death in that war. And those deaths are horror enough for this world.
This is a thrilling read and one of my favorite books of the year.
The author’s website is www.themorpheusseries.com
–Bill McCloud
Editor’s note: Douglas Volk, who served in the U.S. Army Reserves from 1970-76, is an life member of the Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America. He is donating one dollar from the sale of each book to VVA.
Douglas Volk’s book is impossible to put down
The Morpheus Conspiracy is a thriller novel that builds with nonstop suspense. The book begins with a vivid description of soldiers trudging through the mud and monsoon rains of Vietnam. When the soldiers come to a hut where a grandmother sells marijuana laced with opium, shadows flicker and enemies with masks of innocence appear, creating a terrible and unexpected event that changes lives forever. One of the soldiers returns with a curse from that fateful day, and a parade of horrors continues along the East coast of the United States.
The author successfully introduces characters and tensions in layered sub-plots of erotic romance, betrayals, psychological ruination, and acts of terror. These characters weave throughout the cursed soldier’s life, as each chapter is fraught with mystery and tension. At the end of the book the characters come together to reveal who they really are . . . a surprising, twisted ending!
Douglas Volk’s book is impossible to put down. The writing is superb, never boring, always titillating, but never overly-sentimental or blatantly predictable. The beauty of this book is in the hidden messages and meanings, the underlying questions and riddles that move between the words, allowing readers to go on adventurous quests for answers that thrill with psychological suspense!
— Surf’s Up Writers Bookshelves
Powerful images and gripping plot
This book is hard to put down. It’s terrifying, and yet you want to keep reading. The dream images are powerful and reminded me of the film Jacob’s Ladder, very different plot but gives the same feeling of dread and unsettling events. Read it while traveling and kept the long flight from being tedious. I’m trying to cast the movie in my mind….
— Amazon review
The Morpheus Conspiracy will keep you up at night
“The Morpheus Conspiracy will keep you up at night, because it’s full of horror and suspense. But it’s also full of compassion for America’s often struggling and often overwhelmed Vietnam War vets – and Douglas Volk is doing everything he can in this book to help them!”
– Joseph Armstrong, President, Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1044
“Volk’s first novel is skillfully plotted… A web of conspiracy woven around four people fighting for their lives and their sanity. A dark thriller … A hard book to put down.”
– Steven Steinbock, Maine Sunday Telegram
“The plot of The Morpheus Conspiracy is tight, its sleep research episodes and characters, believable. But be forewarned, gentle readers. Like land mines, violence, sex and graphic terms are planted in virtually every chapter. This is not the book for anyone into the softer side of dreams.”
– Hannah Seymour, Kennebec Journal
