Day: July 17, 2019

Gamblers of Love


Back in the late 1960s, Hack and some friends of his would sometimes play a game of brackets to decide who was the sexiest celebrity. They ultimately gave it up because every time they played, the winner was Natalie Wood. When Ms. Wood tragically drowned in 1981, Hack had one of his many nervous breakdown and if he death is mentioned to him now, he becomes violent and insists that she is still alive and looks exactly as she did in “The Great Race.” When he does book signings, fans are required to sign a disclosure promising that they won’t bring her up in his presence.

Jonny’s Run

Actress Jenny Agutter fell onto Hack’s radar after he watched a single scene from the sci-fi “Logan’s Run.”

It seems that Logan (played by Michael York) and his scantily-clad girlfriend Jessica (Ms. Agutter) have been on their eponymous run for a while when they inexplicably happen across some animal furs in an icey cave. Jessica suggests they put them on but Logan, being a red-blooded dude, insists that they take their wet clothes off first “before they freeze on us.” Because this is a movie, that means that Logan just has to take off his shirt while Jessica removes every stitch before wrapping herself in the Wookie skin (or whatever kind of animal they have in the world of the movie). Her nudity was totally exploitative and, from Hack’s twisted perspective, totally mind-blowing. He immediately ran out of the theater and wrote this novelization, which is nothing more than an extended sexual fantasy where a Hack Werker-like character leaps into the scene and performs unspeakable perversions with Ms. Agutter.

Although not a success in its first printing, it sells well today at science fiction conventions.

The Perfect Sleeper

Every year, Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. writes an elaborate Christmas story and has a contest during its creation where his friends suggest a celebrity and the one he likes the most gets included in an illustration along with the person who suggested him or her. Every year, Jonny’s buddy Glenn submitted 1970s sex starlet Joey Heatherton and Jonny finally made him the winner. But in the illustration, Glenn was depicted with the then-current 70 year-old version of Joey and not the one he pined for in his boyhood.

Hack thought that was an outrageous injustice and wrote this book in protest. The title comes from a series of suggestive commercials she made for the Serta Perfect Sleeper mattress.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Joey Heatherton, here’s a commercial she made for the Perfect Sleeper in her heyday: