When he found out that his cover artist Jonny M. was an actual friend of his biggest celebrity crush Frances Fisher, Hack became so consumed with jealousy that he wrote this novel as retribution. As with many of Hack’s novels though, he lost focus while writing and the last three quarters of the thing jarringly turn into a story that has nothing to do with what it started as. There is one amazingly graphic orgy scene between the inhabitants of two warring planets that almost makes it worthwhile.
These two short stories were packaged as a novel in this “Two Great Books Under One Cover.” Of special interest is “Imaginary Lover” which Hack wrote about his friend Glenn Simon’s fascination with 1970’s sex kitten Joey Heatherton, which is essentially a 75-page sex fantasy that somehow found its way into print. It won an O. Henry Award.
Hack went through many phases where he thought that playing a musical instrument would make him irresistible to women. The concertina era was probably the most disastrous where he would confront random women frantically pumping the bellows (which he had no concept of how to actually play) and then proposition them sexually, inevitably receiving a brutal beating from their male companions or from the women themselves (often both). He wrote this highly idealized novelization of the experiment in which the fictional version of himself was infinitely more successful with the ladies than he was in real life.
A stenographer in the secretarial pool of a big corporation gets passed around the top executives for anal sex until she becomes president of the company and fires them all.
Hack’s friends Lacie and Robin are a married lesbian couple who maintain a YouTube channel about the joys and pitfalls of maintaining a sex-sex relationship. Hack is afraid of both of them and wrote this book to suck up to them because he’s terrified of what they’ll do if he ever makes them angry.
Hack wrote this to appease all the people who were pissed off about Sex Slaves of Sex Island. It turned out they they were even more pissed off about this.
Hack was coy about his obsession with actress Lynda Carter when he wrote “The Amazon Warriors” that was influenced by her “Wonder Woman” TV series. In this book, she’s actually the lead character although Hack doesn’t seem to comprehend that the actress and her Wonder Woman character aren’t one and the same and has Ms. Carter actually doing battle with Donald Trump and kicking his pudgy orange ass in the process.
Hack wrote a couple of novelizations of the “Professor Morlock” horror film franchise for a few quick bucks and they’re pretty entertaining. As with all the “Morlocks,” the insane professor is obsessed with transplanting somebody’s brain into someone else’s cranium, with a few scares and some gratuitous nudity thrown in before he is gunned down just before he can make the first incision and sent back to hell. It was right up Hack’s alley.
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.
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.
