Something Very Bad Was Coming

When Hack’s cover artist Jonny M.’s Bro Joe posted an amusing story on his Facebook wall about how an obnoxious beatnik dragged a gigantic speaker into a Starbucks he was at to blast his personal music through its loudspeakers to the annoyance of everyone around him. But Joe lost Hack’s sympathy when he wrote of the man “He is also wearing a beret, so I knew something very bad was coming” since the beret is famously Jonny’s headwear of choice and Hack doesn’t like anyone besides himself to publicly mock his collaborator. So Hack crapped out this angry response to Bro Joe’s missive depicting him as a MAGA-loving redneck. It’s actually a pretty accurate depiction.

The Eye of the Beholder

This is one of Hack’s more esoteric novels, inspired by a holiday called Beautiful Day, which celebrates all things of beauty. Hack had an idea for a story in which the hero seeks out “true beauty” but he and his cover artist Jonny M. discussed what was beautiful to them and they could only think of hot chicks, to which their male friends agreed. Jonny’s pug Boris suggested pug food, so that was thrown into the mix but the resulting story was only seven pages long. Fortunately, Hack started getting suggestions from female acquaintances along the lines of painting, music and natural phenomenons like sunrises, inspiring faces, and the white plastic bag from American Beauty, which gave Hack enough material (padded by a bunch of his signature anal sex scenes) for a full-length novel (and one of his better ones).