Walk Like an Egyptian

Hack originally wrote this in 1958 as a conventional horror tale titled “The Mummy’s Curse” but when his cover artist Jonny M. told him of his affection for Bangles’ lead singer Susanna Hoffs, he rewrote it with Hoffs and Jonny as the lead characters (since Jonny always depicted himself in the role anyway). When Jonny posted his cover art on his Instagram account, he said said “it resulted in one of the highlights of my miserable life”:

The Giant Killers

This was Hack’s first attempt at a children’s book. He didn’t understand the format at all and peppered it with scenes of anal sex (the ones with the giant violating the normal-sized women he holds captive are especially disturbing). It was a disaster as a kids’ book but Hustler Magazine named it one of their 10 best novels of the year.

Innocence Bound

This was one of Hack’s most controversial titles.The city’s mob kingpin has his goons kidnap a senior from a nearby Catholic high school and play cards to see which of the town’s supervillains will take her virginity. Boris gets in the game to save her and just as he is of the verge of winning, he loses the last hand with four aces to the kingpin’s royal flush (Hack doesn’t really understand poker). But just as the kingpin is about to deflower her, Boris takes out a semi-automatic and blows everyone at the table away. It’s a feel-good escapist piece of fluff.

The Diner of Death

Hack used to go to a diner where he would stare at a beautiful woman eating her breakfast with such intensity that she became unnerved and was certain that he wanted to kill her. Hack became so offended that he actually did devise a plot to kill her but it got derailed when he found out that her boyfriend was devising a plot to kill him. Long story short, Hack switched to Denny’s but wrote this book about the experience.

The Slave Princess: Naked and in Chains

Hack wrote this to try and capitalize on the “sex and sandals” craze popularized at the time by the film “Hercules” starring bodybuilder Steve Reeves. It’s pretty good but like so many of Hack’s books, it loses focus and the last 50 pages are about a spaceship battle. It developed a small cult following five years after its original publication when LSD came into vogue and the plot finally made some sense.

Runaway Virgin

A virgin sacrificing her innocence to get a man to help her get out of some scandal is a common Hack Werker theme, although all of his vestal characters inexplicably throw themselves into enthusiastically receiving angry anal intercourse as their first sexual encounter. When asked about that, Hack testily replies “my first time was having something shoved up my rectum, and it didn’t do me a bit of harm!” He never elaborates, as he inevitably breaks down weeping after that.

The Client had a Hugh Rack

Hack has been trying to get his friend Harmony Sanchez into the sack for year but since she finds him physically repulsive, it’s doubtful that it will ever happen. That didn’t stop Hack from writing this detective novel as a tribute to her “epic pair of boobs” (as he describes them on page one) in which the character based on her has no money so she has to pay the detective by letting him “titty fuck the shit out of her.” Surprisingly, it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel although the president of the Mystery Writers of America (who give out the prize) was immediately voted out of office after the announcement.