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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:

Desperado

Hack wrote this volume about Linda Ronstadt, whose poster adorned the interior of the van he lives in throughout the 1970’s. Her version of “Desperado” is one of his all-time favorite recordings, and he wrote this novel after once again drunkenly listening to it and dissolving into tears because she didn’t share the obsessive love that he had for her. Hack was interviewed for the 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of Her Voice” but the footage was unusable when he broke into hysterics and attempted to jump out of a window.

The Affairs of Mrs. Miniver

The first movie Hack saw in a theater was “Adventure,” superstar Clark Gable’s comeback after World War II that was advertised with the famous slogan “Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him.” The Garson referred to was British actress Greer Garson, who made her American film debut in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and won her the first of four consecutive Academy Award nominations, culminating in the Oscar in 1942 for her most famous role as the stiff upper-lip British housewife overcoming the hardships of war in “Mrs. Miniver.” Ms. Garson was lauded as The Perfect Lady during her years at MGM and Hack admitted to sordid sexual fantasies which (in his words) “tore her off her goddamned perch.” This book is little more than an account of those fantasies, loosely strung together by an implausible plot in which Hitler will be killed if Mrs. Miniver has sex with every man in London. Although declared “unreadable” by The Tolucan Times, Hack considers it to be his masterpiece.

In the Arms of the Angels

Hack originally wrote this book in 1960 as an unpublished manuscript titled “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.

The Screw-Ups/Operation Macho Men

Hack claimed that the novella “Operation: Macho Men” was a true account of his service with the Special Ops division of the armed forces during the Vietnam War. In truth, Hack was rejected for the service because of bone spurs in his feet and acute alcoholism and this book is actually a poorly written update of the John Wayne movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima” with (as always) some scenes of anal sex thrown in.

Billie Newman: Girl Reporter

Another TV show that Hack was obsessed with in the 1970s was the dramatic spin-off “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant.” As is usually the case, he fell in love with the series’ attractive female character Billie Newman (played by actress Linda Kelsey) and could not be convinced that she wasn’t a real person. He ultimately began committing a series of petty crimes in the hopes that Billie Newman would write a story on them but they only resulted in his getting a six month jail sentence where a brutal beating by a fellow inmate blocked any memory of Billie Newman from his mind. He did develop a short-lived crush on Ed Asner.

The Client was a Maneater

Kate Micucci is an actress known for her appearances on such TV shows as “The Big Bang Theory,” “Scrubs” and “Raising Hope,” and for her work with Riki Lindhome as the musical duo Garfunkel & Oates (named after second bananas from other famous musical duos). Hack developed an obsession for her after hearing their comedy song “The Loophole” about some Catholic girls getting around sacrificing their virginity with their boyfriends by engaging in anal sex. Since anal sex is one of the most prominent themes in Hack’s works, he wrote this novel in which Ms. Micucci knocks out John Oates with her ukulele and assumes his identity, taking her down a trail that is all too familiar to anyone who has read Hack’s books. Mercifully (as is frequently the case in his stories), Hack lost focus and the last hundred pages are just an angry rant about his father.

The book sold well within the Bible Belt.

The Client Yada Yadaed

This book was inspired by the famous “Seinfeld” episode “The Yada Yada” in which Elaine (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) conversationally edits a story about a sexual encounter with “yada yada…I never heard from him again.” After writing dozens of unanswered angry letters to the producers of “Seinfeld” demanding to know the details of what she “yada yadaed” over, Hack wrote his version of what happened which was just 139 pages of sordid sexual encounters between the character and a series of men, women and animals who inexplicably show up at her apartment. It won Hack a National Book Award.

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.