"Open Minds, Open Books"

D.L. Havlin-Author

MAINSTREAM - SUSPENSE - HISTORICAL ________________________________________________________________________

Hidden Door September on Echo Creek The Hangin' Oak Essay Short Story

Reading entertainment you will remember!

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Award winning works

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River Geezer Editing

Wild Blue Yonder

POW

2008 POW! Author of the Year, Dennis Havlin from Bokellia, FL. The Hangin' Oak took top honors as the highest rated book of the year, and won in the Mystery genre.

The Hangin’ Oak

Don’t believe in ghosts? Imagine being skeptical of their existence, only to find they are real and that by accident you’ve carried two unwanted spirits home. In the novel, The Hangin’ Oak, a happy, prosperous couple finds their lives and futures upended under the influence of two apparitions thrust forward in time one hundred-forty-years. Forced to cope with the reality posed by the other, the fortunes of humans and specters lead them to forge a relationship to help solve each other’s sets of problems. Moments of humor mixed with drama and suspense in this character driven mainstream novel will urge the reader to re-examine the question, "Are there such things as ghosts?"

Set in modern central Florida oak forest and pine scrub, Dan and Angela Davies, witness the result of a hanging 140 years in the past. The following is the passage where the couple first encounters the ghosts that will become part of their lives.

He heard Angela's breath escape in a gassy burst someplace close to his head. Her hand squeezed tightly, urgently on his shoulder. Dan looked up at her. She stared through a thinly veiled opening in the underbrush to where the huge old hangin' oak stood. His eyes followed her gaze.

There, hanging from the tree, were two bodies, suspended from the limb over the road, precisely at the spot where he'd been standing that afternoon. He flinched as those feelings returned.

Angela placed her hand on his head and gently turned it to the right. Several yards back up the roadbed two men, with their backs to Dan and Angela, sat mounted on horses. Each carried a torch that burned with an odd orange-green cast, causing him to be visible in semi-silhouette form. One of the men looked tall, but he slumped over in the saddle so his true size was hard to ascertain. The source of the sobs and moans, his body racked with their utterances. The second man, much shorter and heavier, sat silently by his companion's side.

But, it was not these two apparitions that arrested their attention. The pathetic bodies dangling from the hangin' oak at the ropes’ ends controlled their vision and would allow only quick glances in the direction of the horsemen. One was a handsome man, the other a beautiful young woman. The corpses’ flesh color, a pasty bluish-white, had no parallel in life. It appeared both had been dead for some time.

Join the Davies in their struggle to free themselves from the ghosts and release their spirit houseguests from repeating the dramatic hanging eternally. The Hangin' Oak provides some serious reflection on human relationships with humor interspersed between suspenseful moments providing the fascinating reading that is D.L Havlin’s style.