Straight From the Author's Mouth

Web Haggard
Created by Walt Hicks

A mixture of Harry Angel, Travis McGee and Harry D'Amour, my character WEB HAGGARD has been released in the first of several proposed short stories.

Web is a man trying to run from his past and a gift, he has been saddled with since puberty. Seems he can see through the eyes of the dying, normally at the point of their demise. In the early eighties, he led the LAPD to the murdered body of Lisa Zachary, and became a minor cause celebre overnight. Inundated with phone calls, telegrams and pleadings from people with missing loved ones, Haggard quit his job at Wal-Mart's Sporting Goods, sold all his belongings, bought a third-hand Winnebago, and tried to vanish.

Still haunted by ghastly visions of the dying and dead, Haggard reluctantly becomes involved with the mysteries of strangers, death. Moving from town to town, living aboard his ramshackle RV, Haggard finds, to his amazement, that people are still able to find him and seek his unusual services. Though disinclined to accept money, his lifestyle forces him to accept expense money, from those desperate to find their missing loved ones -- even though by the time Haggard is able to locate the missing, they are usually dead. At least there's some closure for his clients -- bitter consolation.

UNDER OATH

• "Unlike far too many kneejerk attempts to blend crime fiction with the supernatural, Hicks actually understands the dynamics of both genres. He writes like an adult, and he doesn't mistake gratuitous sex and violence for grit or depth, seeing them for the cheap thrills and lazy writing they usually are. His hero, Web Haggard, and indeed all his characters, are real people, with real emotions and motives, not cardboard characters shuffled around to suit some lame, artificial plot that indulges some disturbed adolescent's fantasy of what real life is all about. That's a rarity in this age of cross-genre cut-and-paste."
  -- Kevin Burton Smith, The Thrilling Detective Web Site

SHORT STORIES

• "Swimming With The Jesus Fish" (20002, Exit The Light)
• "The Deadly Silver Web" (2003, The Ghostbreakers: New Horrors)

RELATED LINKS

• I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts
  A listing of fantasy & occult eyes. Suffice it to say that we're definitely not in Kansas anymore...

Humbly submitted by Walt Hicks. Thanks, Walt, and good luck.