Douglas Volk is a veteran corporate executive who also writes dark thrillers that are “hard to put down” (Maine Sunday Telegram). The author of The MorpheusConspiracy and two more forthcoming novels in The Morpheus Series, he is also the recently retired CEO of the award-winning Volk Packaging Corporation.
One of the most interesting things about Volk’s approach to novel writing is the way he uses the tools of business to build his thrillers from the ground up. After assembling a team of specialists with firsthand knowledge of sleep science, crime scene forensics, psychiatry and law enforcement homicide investigation techniques, he taps into the team’s expertise throughout the writing and editing process in each of his books.
Thanks to this “team approach,” his paranormal crime thrillers have often been praised for their credibility and convincingly realistic detail.
Volk’s novels also frequently include another of his major concerns: the painful and deeply disturbing impact of the “betrayal” of U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam by their own government. As a U.S. Army veteran himself, he’s passionately committed to telling stories about that tragic betrayal whenever he can.
Douglas Volk lives in Maine with his wife of more than 45 years. They have two adult children and five grandchildren.
Says the hardworking author, who’s also published datelined news stories on Cuba and Rwanda for the Boston Globe and Portland (ME) Press Herald in recent years: “I learned a long time ago that success depends on getting all the input you can from other people—and then pushing your own creativity “to the max”.
Douglas Volk is the author of The Morpheus Conspiracy, the first installment of a trilogy called The Morpheus Series. (Spenser R. Hasak)
It took Douglas Volk nearly 37 years to write his first novel. Here it is just two years later, and the 1966 Swampscott High grad has become downright prolific, releasing his third psychological thriller.
“Destiny Returns,” the final edition of his trilogy, “The Morpheus Series,” came out last month and is a hit with readers and critics.
“Volumes II and III each took me only five years to write,” Volk said. “All they needed was one good rewrite. The first book took forever. I was a CPA. I ran a family business. What did I know about writing? But I had the story idea, and did lots of research. I strive for authenticity.” He even studied dream therapy and spent a few nights at a sleep lab at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, observing patients, many of them veterans, and asking questions.
Volk is chatting from his winter home in Naples, Fla. The retired CEO of Biddeford, Maine-based family-owned Volk Packaging Corp. and his wife of 48 years, Revere native Gail Charak, plan to return to the Pine Tree State next week.
He is proud of the three-book series.
Volume I, “The Morpheus Conspiracy,” the psychological thriller he started in the 1970s that was eventually self-published in 2018, focuses on a paranormal curse that gives a Vietnam veteran the power to invade other people’s nightmares … with deadly results. Its main character, David Collier, returns home from the battlefields of war, feeling betrayed by his country, his girlfriend and citizens who offer no respect or thanks for his service. This combat veteran developed a new form of PTSD that somehow gave him the power to travel in and out of human dreams and kill his victims as they sleep. A reviewer said it is “a great work of terrifying horror and unrelenting suspense.”
In Volume II, “The Surgeon’s Curse,” the dreaded Curse of Morpheus has infected a new host, demented VA psychiatrist Dr. Michael Rogers, who uses it to attack his victims by invading their nightmares. Once again, a scientist must confront a killer who relies on “Somnambulistic Telepathy” — the paranormal ability to sneak into the dreams of sleepers — and then kill them. A reviewer said “Volk is a marvelous storyteller and excels at writing realistic dialogue.”
In the new Volume III, “Destiny Returns,” the curse has taken over the mind of a powerful politician in Chicago, who infiltrates foes’ nightmares and drives them to suicide. “He made me do it” farewell notes are found near most victims’ bodies. “Destiny Returns,” which brings back many characters from Volume II, is filled with blackmail, murder, kinky sex, suicide. … and humor. Readers have called it action-packed, romantic and comical. … with a twisted twist at the end.
The plight of America’s veterans was a central theme in the first book and plays a part in the other two. The president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1044 in Biddeford said Volume I is “full of horror and suspense … and full of compassion for America’s often struggling Vietnam War veterans.”
Volk said he has “immense respect and admiration” for veterans. He finished his military service with the Army Reserve in 1976 after serving with the Transportation Corps at the South Boston Army Base and a facility in Auburn, Maine. Last year, he and his nephew Derek Volk, who is company president, raised money to build a Heroes Wall” on the front lawn of their corporate offices. Derek Volk was able to raise funds by creating a series of commemorative tiles that were placed on the 7-foot-tall, 50-foot-long cement wall. The Volks also raised more than $20,000 in donations for the renovation of the local VFW Post.
What’s next? Does Douglas Volk have a fourth book in him? After a chuckle, he said “You never know. I’m very pleased with this trilogy. It took me a while to finish them, starting when I was working full time and raising a family, but I’m proud of how they turned out.
“I retired last year, so I definitely have the time to tackle a fourth book. I’m trying to find an agent. I realize these are not stories that will be taught at a Harvard literary class. I’m not Ernest Hemingway. But response has been good … even if my friends who read them see me on the street and run to the other side of the street (because of the weird subject matter),” he said, then laughed.
For additional information, go to www.themorpheusseries.com. One dollar from every paperback book sold is donated to veterans organizations.
Douglas Volk had a great idea for a book, but he never imagined it would take nearly 37 years to write it.
“The Morpheus Conspiracy,” a psychological thriller that came out Nov. 12, posits that the Vietnam War was triggered by a paranormal curse in which a veteran has the power to invade other people’s nightmares … with deadly results.
Volk, a 1966 Swampscott High grad, got the idea when he was a student at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Those were the turbulent days of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the Kent State shootings and anti-war demonstrations. Richard Nixon was president and the Vietnam War dragged on.
“From 1968 to ’74, like many college students, my life was in turmoil. Those were the days of the draft lottery. (My birth date) was number 49. I had a deferment until I graduated in 1970. I had a great job waiting, as a CPA for Arthur Andersen in Boston,” said Volk. “It was very real that I could be sent to fight in Vietnam.”
Some of his fellow students lied about health issues and found doctors willing to back up their lies for a price. “I couldn’t do that. The best option for me was the Army Reserve, a six-year commitment on weekends and nights, mostly at the South Boston base, and summer camp,” he said.
“I went on active duty on Friday the 13th in November 1970. I went through basic training and infantry training. The kids I was with were all going to Vietnam. It left a lasting impression, especially how mean (the training) was. Kill or be killed. The kids were taught to hate, dehumanize the enemy. I know that many of these kids didn’t make it home.
“Every day I followed what was happening in the Vietnam War and what happened to the Vietnam vets when they got home. … People cursed them. They were treated like the enemy, these kids who put their lives on the line for us. It was horrible.”
In 1974, post-traumatic stress disorder hit the radar. This mental health condition is triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it — and there was finally a name to what caused suffering in many Vietnam vets. Symptoms include recurring nightmares, and that got Douglas Volk thinking about his book more and more.
In “The Morpheus Conspiracy,” the book’s main character, David Collier, returns home from the battlefields of war, feeling betrayed by his country, his girlfriend and citizens who offer no respect or thanks for his service.
“This combat veteran developed a new form of PTSD that somehow gives him the power to travel in and out of human dreams and kill his victims as they sleep,” said Volk, offering a short synopsis. “There’s a corrupt VA psychiatrist and a sleep scientist, who struggles to understand and then defeat this paranormal force.”
Volk said he started to seriously formulate the story in 1974. He researched dream therapy and spent a few nights at a sleep lab at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, observing patients, many of them veterans, and asking questions.
Volk said he was alone in his car on a rural road in New Hampshire in 1982 when he stopped and shouted, “I’m going to write that (darned) book.”
“I honked the horn, and startled a bunch of Holsteins that were standing in a field. I was a financial guy. Numbers and business. When I came up with this book idea, I’d never written a thing. But I was determined. It was like setting a goal to be in the Olympics, totally unrealistic.”
He sought advice from a running partner who was a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He took writing classes. He got an editor. He’d write when he could steal an hour here and there: 4 a.m. at home, during breaks at his kids’ swim meets, over coffee at a nearby diner populated by local characters. “It was difficult. I had two boxes of rewritten pages under my bed, where they sat for awhile. My kids, 10 and 12 at the time, got angry at me. ‘Dad. You’re always telling us not to quit,’ and they’d pull the boxes out from under the bed.”
He persevered. In 1992 he got a new editor, who had worked for the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. He consulted psychiatrists, police detectives, DNA forensic experts and others. “I needed everything to be factual and authentic,” he said. “I was never in the military. This was my team of experts.” In 1998, he finally came out with the first edition of “The Morpheus Conspiracy” and embarked on a quickie tour of libraries and bookstores from Swampscott to Maine, where he’d read from and, hopefully, sell a few copies.
“I was done. I moved on, but I was never happy with the ending. So that’s been redone for this second edition. Two years for that rewrite, nearly 37 years after I got the idea.”
The amazing thing? Volk, who through all this worked full-time as CEO of Biddeford, Maine-based family-owner Volk Packaging Corp., has finished two more related books. “The Surgeon’s Curse” and “Destiny Returns” complete the “Morpheus” trilogy. “Each took me only five years to write,” he said, then smiled. “All they need is one good rewrite.” He’s hopeful ‘Surgeon’s Curse” comes out in the spring and book three in the fall.
Reviewers have praised “Morpheus.” The president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1044 in Biddeford said the book is “full of horror and suspense … and full of compassion for America’s often struggling Vietnam War veterans.”
Volk lives in Maine where he and wife of 46 years, Revere native Gail Charak, raised a son and daughter. They have five grandchildren, including 2-year-old twins.
Commentary: Nixon set stage for continuing decline in public trust
His betrayal of a campaign promise to end the Vietnam War led Americans to be wary of what their government tells them.
BY DOUGLAS VOLK SPECIAL TO THE TELEGRAM
I was a 19-year-old college student in the fall of 1968, when Richard Nixon made a campaign promise to bring “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” if he won that year’s presidential election.
Nixon captured the White House and became the nation’s 37th president by narrowly defeating Hubert Humphrey on Nov. 7, 1968.
He soon broke that campaign promise, however.
Instead of ending the war and bringing the troops home, he secretly expanded it into Laos and Cambodia and then launched several more years of incessant aerial bombing. Year after year the war raged on, with tragic consequences for everyone involved.
During the fighting that took place in the four-plus years preceding the 1973 peace accords, an additional 22,000 U.S. soldiers and 500,000 Asians would die.
For what?
According to most historians of the Vietnam War, the peace terms of January 1973 were almost exactly the same that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had offered Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, in 1969.
Like millions of other Americans, I was deeply affected by the continuation of the war.
At first, like so many others, I took the new president at his word.
More than a little frightened and disgusted by the spiraling warfare that had followed the “Tet Offensive” and the “My Lai Massacre” of 1968, I drove from the University of Massachusetts to Washington to watch Nixon’s inauguration in January of 1969.
I’ve never forgotten that day – or the antiwar protesters who surged through the nation’s capital.
Later that year, the first-ever draft lottery got underway, and my birthdate was chosen as No. 41 – which meant I would be drafted and most likely sent to Vietnam as soon as I graduated in June 1970.
I found myself struggling with difficult choices.
While many of my fellow students were thinking seriously about fleeing to Canada or even paying a doctor to make up a phony illness that might provide them with a draft deferment, I felt compelled to fulfill my military obligation.
But I also knew that if were drafted, I’d almost certainly end up being sent to Vietnam.
While I wrestled with all of this in May, 1970, four student Vietnam War protesters were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University and 4.5 million college students went on strike to protest the expansion of the war into Cambodia.
Like many, I was appalled, disgusted and saddened.
In the end, however, I decided to enlist in the U.S. Army Reserve.
At the end of my six-year obligation, I received an Honorable Discharge in 1976. During those tumultuous years, I watched the social mayhem that had been triggered by Nixon’s betrayal of America’s fighting men and women.
All too often, they returned to “The World” to find themselves mocked and despised by a society that had lost most of its faith in America’s pursuit of the war and most of its trust in a duplicitous president.
That same president’s fate would be decided in the summer of 1974, of course, when he was driven from office by the nation’s outrage over the Watergate scandal.
As many historians have suggested, today’s growing distrust of the federal government (and of politicians in general) can be traced back to the deceit that followed Richard Nixon’s first election to the White House, 50 years ago this week.
Fueled by such scandals as “Iran-Contra” during the Ronald Reagan administration of the 1980s and the “Monica Lewinsky Affair” and subsequent impeachment trial under President Bill Clinton a decade later, the decline in political trust has reached new lows since the election of President Trump in 2016.
Indeed, that precipitous decline has now reached the point where only 18 percent of Americans believe they can trust the federal government, according to a recent poll by the authoritative Pew Research Center.
As each day brings new reports of the political infighting and dishonest-deal-making which threaten to destabilize our country, I worry about my two adult children and five grandchildren.
Fifty years after Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War betrayal triggered the decline in public trust, I’m concerned it may soon destroy the values we treasure most – with consequences impossible to predict.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Volk of Cumberland Foreside is the author of a recent novel “The Morpheus Conspiracy” (www.themorpheusseries.com) about the devastating impact of the Vietnam War on U.S. combat veterans.
Boston Globe
OPINION | DOUGLAS VOLK
For Cuba’s young people, the time is now
By Douglas Volk, April 19, 2015, 12:00 a.m.
IT WAS a moment of supreme irony.
Sitting on metal folding chairs in a tiny rehearsal space, my wife Gail and I were amazed to hear the US Marine Corps official march being played with enthusiasm by the Banda Municipal Concerto Infanti — an accomplished symphony orchestra made up of Cuban kids aged 14 to 18.
The performance of “Semper Fidelis,” led by a famed conductor and trumpeter who once accompanied Frank Sinatra at Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub, took place during our recent tour of Cuba as part of a US-based cultural exchange program.
The concert also shed an interesting new light on a deeply troubled country. Cuba has been thrust onto the world stage following President Obama’s decision to begin restoring diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s once-reviled Communist society. As we saw often on our tour, this is also a nation vibrating with youthful energy, with artistic creativity, and with a newly emerging and exuberant sense of hope among young people who consider the recently announced political thaw an opportunity to begin revitalizing their long dormant homeland.
Make no mistake: This is a country where food is still carefully rationed, where consumer goods such as clothes and electronics are often impossible to get, and where even skilled physicians make less than $70 a month.
During our 12-day, 860-mile journey through the Pennsylvania-sized island nation, we found evidence everywhere of the high price Cuba has paid as a result of its half-century-long experiment with Soviet-style communism. Whether we were looking at dilapidated buildings in downtown Havana or driving on streets full of battered old Fords and Chevys from the pre-revolutionary world of the 1950s, the economic impact of a 55-year-old US embargo and 1989 collapse and withdrawal from Cuba of the Soviet Union was powerfully evident.
So, too, were signs of a revival.
At the Banda Municipal rehearsal hall in Villa Clara Province (about 300 miles from Havana), the aging but energetic conductor-trumpeter Marcos Antonio Urbay Serafin directed his teenage musicians through classics by Tchaikovsky, Sousa, and the Beatles. Their performance was a powerful display of the upbeat energy of Cuba’s youth.
Lean and intense, the no-nonsense conductor watched over his adolescent musicians like a hawk. Glaring intently at his charges, he lived up to his reputation as a strict disciplinarian who never stops underlining the importance of practice and self-discipline. And yet his students were also brimming with high spirits and cheerful laughter during every break in their high-octane concert.
Later, our impressively articulate tour guide (recently college-educated and only 26 herself) led a question-and-answer session in which we learned how the maestro had recruited these talented kids from around the coastal city of Caibarien. After teaching them to read music and play their instruments, Serafin spent several years building an accomplished orchestra.
The same playful but deeply serious attitude we witnessed in Villa Clara Province was evident during a rehearsal by the Endedans Modern Dance Company in the central-Cuba city of Camaguey, where we saw a troupe of talented ballet dancers glide through some impressive pirouettes. Like their fellow students at Camaguey’s Vicentina de la Torre Art School, the young dancers pay no tuition and work tirelessly to perfect their skills.
A few days earlier, in Cuba’s capital city we had watched the highly regarded Habana Compas Dance company (its members are age 20-24) cavort through an eclectic program built around Latin rhythms teased from a catchy flamenco theme. The dancers used canes, drumsticks, slippers, and even a platoon of brightly painted wooden chairs to knock out a series of pop dances that inspired toe-tapping and clapping.
These Cuban youngsters were having lots of fun, but when we talked to them later, we were surprised by their sharp focus on hard work and discipline. That same message resonated when we spoke with the youthful musical director, Eduardo Cordova, who loudly declared, “Work, work, and work — I always say that, because nobody can fight against work!”
As our visit continued, we heard that theme often. It was easy to understand why — given the terrific problems Cuba now faces. Cubans are burdened with a dangerously low birthrate (Cuban president Raul Castro calls it “one of the greatest challenges now facing our nation”), and a serious housing shortage. On top of that, the slowly lifting but still damaging economic blockade is forcing Cubans to confront a worn-out infrastructure and soaring black-market prices that put many of them on the edge of poverty.
But despite the hurdles, optimism is in the air, especially among the young. Everywhere we went, we heard about dreams of prosperity.
“We Cubans have suffered greatly during our conflict with the US,” said one of our tour guides, while talking freely during a bus ride to Santiago, our final stop. “But now we think a better day is coming, and we’re full of hope.”
Portland Press Herald
Posted
Maine Voices: Rwanda not only survives but flourishes 20 years after genocide
The nation’s new spirit is evident in its schools for girls, jobs for women and environmental projects.
BY DOUGLAS VOLK
KIGALI, Rwanda — It was a moment of overwhelming horror.
We were standing in an exhibition room at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, which honors the nearly 1 million people who were slaughtered during the 1994 tribal conflict in this East African country of 12 million. The tragedy began 20 years ago this month.
On the walls were a series of heart-rending children’s pictures and stories telling how they’d been methodically tortured and murdered.
Numb with shock, my wife, Gail, and I gazed mournfully at each other. Until our arrival, all we’d known about this strife-torn country was what we’d seen in the Academy Award-nominated “Hotel Rwanda,” a fictional account of the genocide that had made the Maryland-sized nation synonymous with wholesale murder. But now – on the third day of our 40,000-mile “National Geographic Wildlife of the World Expedition” (seven unforgettable countries in 23 days) – we were suddenly face to face with the utterly unspeakable.
As incredible as it sounds, the Kigali museum was located beside an immense burial ground, a vast cemetery where 250,000 Tutsis now lay interred. Triggered by long-standing conflicts between the Tutsis and the country’s other major ethnic group, the Hutus, the Rwandan savagery of 1994 had left the entire world alarmed and appalled.
Another dreadful aspect of the catastrophe was the abysmal failure of the international community to step in and prevent it. No less a figure than former President Bill Clinton would later admit as much, while suggesting to numerous interviewers that world leaders might have saved nearly 500,000 lives by sending only 5,000 peacemakers to Rwanda.
As we toured the memorial center, we found ourselves wondering if a society that had endured so much trauma would ever be able to recover its balance and rebuild.
To our amazement, however, we discovered that the answer to that question was a resounding and triumphant “yes”!
During the three days in which we toured “The Land of a Thousand Hills,” we would visit or learn about a pioneering new school for bright young Rwandan girls, the Akilah (“Wisdom” in Kiswahili) Institute for Women, along with a new land-reclamation and tree-planting project, and even an artfully designed international eatery (Heaven Restaurant & Inn in Kigali) noted for its outstanding gourmet fare.
After hearing so much about the suffering of women in Rwanda, where 85 percent of them still work in “subsistence agriculture” and live on $2 a day, it was astonishing to learn about the Kigali-based Akilah Institute’s bold leadership in educating young women for newly created, well-paying jobs.
At Akilah (where the classroom building is named “Spring of Hope”), 67 percent of the 150 students are from rural Rwanda, but 100 percent go on to jobs in information processing and the hospitality industry – or launch start-up businesses of their own.
Rwanda’s new spirit was also evident at the Heaven Restaurant, where the owners – Americans Josh and Alissa Ruxin – have won kudos for their fine food during the past 10 years. Over a delicious lunch, Alissa talked happily about her years at Heaven, now a landmark for hungry travelers from all over East Africa. She also told us how their Rwandan restaurant employees are “now paying for their own health care, rent, food for their families and even higher education for themselves and their siblings.”
This rapidly emerging sense of hope and purpose could also be seen in the remarkable cleanliness of Rwandan cities, towns and villages in 2014.
But when it came to sheer, breathtaking beauty, nothing could match the mountain gorillas at Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. Mild-mannered and relaxed, they cavorted happily around their jungle home, often moving within a few feet of their fascinated visitors.
Strolling through their habitat, we found it easy to understand why the nation’s tourism-based economy has been growing at an annual rate of 8 percent during the past four years.
Just before we left, I accidentally brushed against one of the female gorillas, who didn’t seem at all fazed by the contact. I can’t say the same for me!
It was a moment I won’t forget. Peaceful and easygoing, these wild animals seem capable of teaching us the lesson we need most today: how to live in harmony with each other and the environment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Volk is CEO at Volk Packaging Corp. in Biddeford.
Douglas Volk
