The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Hack loosely based this novel on his affair with singer Keely Smith, who dated him briefly after her divorce from Louis Prima. Hack always referred to her as “the one that got away” whereas Ms. Smith would later call Hack “that perverted bastard.”
This is a unique title in Hack’s collected works because it’s a wholesome kid’s book in which there is no sex whatsoever. It’s actually a pretty adorable takeoff on “The Arabian Nights” which fell flat on its face because his devoted readership bought Hack Werker novels for scenes of anal sex, not cutesy-poo adventures on a flying carpet. Hack later disowned the book, claiming that he only wrote it to impress a nursery school teacher that he wanted to have anal sex with.
Hack became obsessed with the idea of Amazon warriors watching the old “Wonder Woman” TV show with Lynda Carter. The producers were going to sue Hack for plagiarism (the novel is a blatant rip-off of the show) but they reached a compromise and loosely based the third season two-part episode “Phantom of the Roller Coaster” on the book instead. The TV version is way better than the book.
Hack’s infrequent stabs at the sci-fi genre are surprisingly pretty good. This cover went into more detail than usual because a fan bought the book “Jonny’s Birthday,” the cover of has literally nothing to do with the contents and the guy tried to sue Hack for a billion dollars in damages. They settled on an autographed headshot and one of Hack’s used Kleenex (the guy collected celebrity used Kleenex).
Hack binged the sitcom “The Office” one weekend and fell in love with star Jenna Fischer as a result. This was the unfortunate result.
Hack based this novel on the trophy wife of a multi-millionaire he once knew whose spouse mysteriously disappeared the day after Hack was heard bragging to all of his friends that she’d agreed to have sex with him if he murdered her husband. The police declared the case unsolved when she disappeared the day after Hack was heard complaining to all of his friends that she’d reneged on her promise to have sex with him.
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.