There was a small theater across the street from the Shakey’s where Hack works as a janitor and he wrote this to try and impress an actress there who he had a crush on. Rather than having the desired effect, her boyfriend dropped in on the van Hack that lives in in the parking lot of the pizzeria and tied his face into a knot.
Hack can’t get anywhere near the water without violently puking his guts out and this romance on the high seas is based on the time he took his second wife in the paddle boats on Tiny Lake Balboa in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles and had to be air-lifted to a nearby hospital. The paramedics immediately discovered that he gets airsick too so all in all, it was a pretty messy day.
A double agent from Kansas tries to get a Hack Werker-like writer of pulp fiction to overthrow the US government. When pressed that Kansas was actually part of the United States, Hack inevitably retorts “That’s exactly what they want you to goddamn think!”
Hack hated his cover artist Jonny M.’s pug Winston so much that he paid a beautiful woman to pretend to fall in love with Jonny and say that she’d only have sex with him if he killed the pug. The plan backfired when she actually did fall in love with Jonny and while they were having sex for the first time, Winston jumped in Hack’s lap and took a large dump.
Hack’s second novel was also the second to be reissued by John Kane with a new cover by Jonny M. and was also a smash hit. Hack always loathed Rock ‘n Roll music and blamed it for society’s downfall. This is the story of Davida, a good girl who listens to her first Bill Haley and His Comets record and quickly descends into a world of reefer and anal sex.
Hack’s first novel went by unnoticed when it was first published in 1958 with forgettable cover art. But when publisher John Kane decided to reissue Hack’s early work with new covers by world-famous graphic artist Jonny M. in 2012, sales exploded and Hack suddenly found himself a major celebrity after years of toiling as an anonymous writer of pulp fiction with a tiny cult.
This first novel dealt with themes Hack would re-explore over the decades as a “good girl” named Amy tries a puff of reefer offered to her by a low-life at a party and she quickly descends into a life as a prostitute who specializes in anal sex, only interested in money for that next joint.