Category: Catnip to the Ladies

Jonny’s Birthday

Hack wrote this book during an alcoholic binge. It’s an incomprehensible mess of indecipherable ranting. But his publisher John Kane needed a new Hack Werker manuscript to fulfill a legal obligation so he had cover artist Jonny M. Work out this cover based on his recent birthday celebration and slapped this title on it. Miraculously, it was embraced by intelligentsia and started showing up on university English classes reading lists. When Hack accepted an honorary doctorate from Stanford, he admitted that he no memory of even writing the thing.

Murder for Hire

When he found out that his cover artist Jonny M. was an actual friend of his biggest celebrity crush Frances Fisher, Hack became so consumed with jealousy that he wrote this novel as retribution. As with many of Hack’s novels though, he lost focus while writing and the last three quarters of the thing jarringly turn into a story that has nothing to do with what it started as. There is one amazingly graphic orgy scene between the inhabitants of two warring planets that almost makes it worthwhile.

Concertina Madness

Hack went through many phases where he thought that playing a musical instrument would make him irresistible to women. The concertina era was probably the most disastrous where he would confront random women frantically pumping the bellows (which he had no concept of how to actually play) and then proposition them sexually, inevitably receiving a brutal beating from their male companions or from the women themselves (often both). He wrote this highly idealized novelization of the experiment in which the fictional version of himself was infinitely more successful with the ladies than he was in real life.

Ménage á Trois

This was originally written in 1965 when two waitresses at the Shakey’s pizza parlor he was the night janitor at conned him into believing that they wanted a 3-way with him when all they really wanted was the use of his van in the pizzeria parking lot to engage in illicit lesbian sex. They locked Hack out of the van as soon as they got inside and while it rocked violently back and forth, he wrote this novel in his head.

The two waitresses spent twenty years as Catholic nuns and are now married to each other and run a feminist bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Terrible Shots/The Man No Woman Could Resist

“The Man No Woman Could Resist” was one of the hundreds of short stories Hack wrote about seducing pop legend Linda Ronstadt. In it, the superstar singer stalks a Hack Werker-like writer of pulp fiction novels until she shows up unannounced one night at his penthouse apartment for a night of violent anal sex. He wrote it while defending himself a restraining order placed against him by a 55 year-old singing waitress who he kept badgering to join him in the van that he lives in for a night of violent anal sex.

A Better Man

Hack was a huge fan of the TV sitcom “Yes, Dear” and fell madly in love with the character Kim Warner. He ultimately became obsessed that Greg Warner, her husband on the show, wasn’t worthy of her and he wrote this novel in an attempt to win Kim Warner’s heart. When he received a letter from network attorneys explaining that Kim Warner was a fictional character and that Jeanne Louisa Kelly (the actress who played her) was happily married in real life to a different man, Hack had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for six months.

In the Arms of the Angels

Hack originally wrote this book in 1960 under the title “Horny Angels Come to Earth to Screw Horny Men,” but reworked it after his cover artist Jonny M. told him of his fondness of Ms. McLachlan’s music and especially her song “Angel.” Although Jonny created the cover for the rewrite because he was contractually obligated to, the pornographic nature of the novel drove a rift between the two men that took years to heal.

Uhura’s Passion

Hack’s forays into sci-fi are infrequent but usually rewarding. This one has Lieutenant Uhura of “Star Trek” jumping ship at the end of the movie where they go back to the twentieth century to save whales so that she can continue her love affair with a Hack Werker-like writer of pulp fiction novels who she met while Captain Kirk was off hitting on a hot marine biologist.

Jonny Stud

Hack grew to despise his cover artist Jonny M. after constantly hearing of his effortless success with women. Hack intended this chronicle to depict Jonny as a superficial loser who lived an empty life but it wound up getting him more babes than ever, resulting in one of Hack’s many unsuccessful suicide attempts.