From Roland's Bookstore

The Dogged and the Damned

From the backcover:

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is a tale inspired by the tragic story of a World War II combat soldier suffering the effects of what was, at the time, a little studied psycholocal impairment that today we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's about a federal veterans psychiatric hospital and its well-meaning staff. And it's about the soldier's war at home as he repeatedly escaped confinement to live by his wits in the wilds.

The story includes the efforts of a county law enforcement agency sometimes bewildered in its ongoing attempts to capture a fugitive the media sensationalized as a "Wild Man." It's a tale of people in a place and at a time when I came to manhood amid that hospital's nearby valleys and surrounding forests and mountains.

I'll freely admit to altering names to protect both innocent and guilty. To better fit my purposes within the novel I've changed places, encounters, circumstances, architecture, characters, and even the years some events took place. If my protagonist appears more heroic than the one actually inspiring this tale, it's the way I wanted to see him when I was sixteen and he was thirty. If those individuals peopling this narrative are more--or less--colorful than the originals, the reader will have to choose whether it's because of my insufficient knowledge, or from a fear the actual characters portrayed may appear too incredible for belief.

It might be illuminating, however, for readers to know that, in my youth, I dwelled as a neigbor to some of those not-so-far--fetched individuals. I also played on the same ballfields, attended the same churches, and danced in the same halls with others. And since this is becoming a confessional of sorts, I was even jailed by the same Sheriff as the one incarcerating the real soldier who inspired this tale--a man driven beyond his depths by the horrors of war.

Though a novel, what I've tried to create are real people in real circumstances. It's a story with a message. Whether one chooses to allow me to make the astonishing possible, one should not ignore it's lessons.

- Roland Cheek

5-1/2 X 8-1/2 12-pt. cover 320 pages $21.95

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Tales of the West that Was

and the West that Is

 

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The seed for The Dogged and the Damned was planted subconsciously almost sixty years ago, there to take root. It was slow growing, that subconcious seedling, hardly recognizable until it began to itch. Naturally the first scratches were refresher courses from newspaper files on the "Wild Man of the Umpqua." With such fertilization, the outcome was inevitable.

So it seems now. But introduction to ejaculation took more than five decades!