Hack based the title character – a mean, semi-illiterate, violently abusive old man who everyone despised – on his own father Vlad, and took obvious delight in constructing scene after scene where the various character try to kill him. The old man finally meets his doom by being beaten to death by a Hack Werker-like pulp fiction writer in circumstances that eerily mirror Vlad’s actual murder (which has never been solved but which many Hack Werker biographer attribute to Hack himself). Whenever he is asked about this book, Hack merely responds with an enigmatic smile and says “the old bastard got what was coming to him.”