Category: Damsels in Distress

Titanic II: Ruth’s Story

This was one of Hack’s many attempts to impress “Titanic” star Frances Fisher. As soon as it hit the shelves, his publisher John Kane was inundated with cease-and-desist orders and had to pull all copies from circulation. Undaunted, Hack got Ms. Fisher’s address from a “map of the star’s homes” and had a copy delivered to her. Regrettably, the map was woefully inaccurate and it wound up at the house of a plumber is Los Feliz, but he reported enjoyed the book thoroughly.

Reefer Slave

This was written in the brief period that Hack thought if he dealt reefer, women would be willing to sleep with him if they couldn’t come up with money. He failed when A> he wound up smoking most of the reefer himself and B> his clients quickly found out that he was a wuss and if they so much as looked at him sternly, he’d give them everything he had for free.

Blaze of Death

Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. was the victim of arson when a person with severe emotional problems tried to burn his house down with him and his pug Boris inside it*. Hack was fascinated by the story and used it as the basis for this novel. Unlike in real life (where the arsonist served a long prison term), in Hack’s version the fire kills Jonny and Boris and the arsonist gets off scotch-free.

* No shit, that really happened.

Boris Taking Charge

When his cover artist Jonny M.’s beloved pug Winston died and Jonny got another pug named Boris, Hack was delighted because he secretly hated Winston. To get Boris on his side from the start, Hack wrote this patronizing saga depicting the young pug as a super power who always fought for the side of right. The book turned out to be prescient because Boris saw through Hack’s bullshit immediately. Hack, in turn, grew to hate Boris even more than he hated Winston.

The Dead of Night

Hack ran into some legal trouble when it came out that he had kept a young woman locked in the basement of his publisher John Kane’s beach house for two months. Hack denied any wrongdoing and insisted that the woman had requested that he shackle and gag her, but he grudgingly accepted a plea bargain to escape the death penalty of life imprisonment (although that was reduced to five weeks on a technicality). The story inspired this novel.

The Ghost of Richard III

When he saw his cover artist Jonny M. give his definitive performance as Shakespeare’s Richard III, Hack was so impressed that he wrote this sequel where the hunchback king comes back to life and blows away all of his surviving enemies. Hack’s version remained surprisingly true to Shakespeare’s original except that while he was waiting in the afterlife, Richard seemed to have developed an insatiable desire for anal sex.

Maximum Wage

Hack’s first book for the Pro99 campaign was such a success that he decided to include more actresses that he was infatuated with on the cover in an attempt to win their favor. For this book, he set his sites on famed Twitter pundit Lisa Glass (who he had already depicted on the cover of an earlier novel “Too Fat to Carry”). As was always the case when Hack used his literary output to hit on women out of his league, Ms. Glass found Hack to be a retched and unsettling character and asked him to leave her “the hell alone.” As usual, Hack refused to take no for an answer and featured her on more book covers than almost any other model.