The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Burt Lancaster!
Honestly, Hack just wanted to write a book titled “Murder at the Nudist Colony” and when he found out Lancaster’s birthday coincided with its release date, he just had the cover artist redo the cover with the actor in his Elmer Gantry role as the victim. The story is more about Jonny the detective running around the nudie colony seducing the women who stay there.
The book opens:
“They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Well, I’ve never had my dick come close to being cut off by a pen.That’s a round about way of introducing you to my writer’s group. We met every Thursday in a little bar in noho near the strip club where the woman I am in love with works. I intend to marry her, once I can figure out how to get the judge to remove the restraining order.
There were seven of us in the group, all professional writers. I was the best and most accomplished writer, though JK and Stephen King would say otherwise. I hated them both and the feeling was mutual. I was always sure that one of them would be the one to try to cut off my dick, not Dave Barry. I thought he was a fruit who didn’t have the balls to try something like that, to be quite candid.
That’s ironic, because when this sorted little story ends, as you’ll see, he’ll have more balls in his hands than he started with.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. “
Hack wrote this autobiographical piece about the time he went home with a chick he met at a bar and her husband walked in just as the ‘shrooms they took kicked in.
The book opening:
“For many people, the holidays are hard. For me, the holidays make me hard. Especially halloween.
Every halloween, I find myself in a bar looking for companionship. By itself, that doesn’t make Halloween any different than any other day of the year. Except on halloween, I’m wearing a slutty costume.
I was three whiskeys into the evening when she walked into the bar. I instantly thought, that’s a woman with potential, that’s a woman I could put a ring on. I didn’t mean a wedding ring. I meant the ring attached to a belt that you put a strap on through.
Little did I know when I started that evening, the evening would end with me getting the shit beat out of me, in a hospital room, not sure if I would live. If I had known that, I would have started the evening much earlier, so it would have lasted that much longer.
Ultimately, this is a story about the redemptive Spirit of Christmas and how it can change our lives and enrich our souls. That may be the shrooms talking since the story took place entirely on Halloween and had nothing at all to do with Christmas whatsoever. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let me start again, at a more appropriate moment, with the gag ball.”
As many of you know, Hack lives in a van parked behind the Shakey’s pizza restaurant on Laurel Canyon Blvd. in Los Angeles. Once when the van was impounded, Hack was forced to sleep on his cover artist Jonny M.’s floor and he couldn’t help but notice Jonny’s pug Boris’ obsession with food (especially when Boris tried to eat his face as he slept one night). The experience inspired Hack to write this gothic epic poem about a ravenous pug, which only after it was published did he realize was a transparent rip-off of Poe’s The Raven. Hack was sued for copyright infringement and had to pay a massive settlement, which surprised legal experts because Poe died in 1849 and the poem had been in public domain for 150 years.
