Hack based this novel on an experience his cover artist Jonny M. And his pug Boris had when they stopped at Barstow for gas during a road trip and were seduced by a trio of sex-starved beauties. As soon as he completed the book, Hack made another of his many failed suicide attempts by sticking his head in the pizza oven of the Shakey’s restaurant where he works as a janitor. Since it was an electric oven, he realized after about three hours that it wouldn’t put him out of his misery and he went back to cleaning toilets.
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 was a huge fan of the TV sitcom “Yes, Dear” and fell madly in love with the character Kim Warner. He ultimately became obsessed that Greg Warner, her husband on the show, wasn’t worthy of her and he wrote this novel in an attempt to win Kim Warner’s heart. When he received a letter from network attorneys explaining that Kim Warner was a fictional character and that Jeanne Louisa Kelly (the actress who played her) was happily married in real life to a different man, Hack had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for six months.
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.
The first movie Hack saw in a theater was “Adventure,” superstar Clark Gable’s comeback after World War II that was advertised with the famous slogan “Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him.” The Garson referred to was British actress Greer Garson, who made her American film debut in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and won her the first of four consecutive Academy Award nominations, culminating in the Oscar in 1942 for her most famous role as the stiff upper-lip British housewife overcoming the hardships of war in “Mrs. Miniver.” Ms. Garson was lauded as The Perfect Lady during her years at MGM and Hack admitted to sordid sexual fantasies which (in his words) “tore her off her goddamned perch.” This book is little more than an account of those fantasies, loosely strung together by an implausible plot in which Hitler will be killed if Mrs. Miniver has sex with every man in London. Although declared “unreadable” by The Tolucan Times, Hack considers it to be his masterpiece.
Another TV show that Hack was obsessed with in the 1970s was the dramatic spin-off “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant.” As is usually the case, he fell in love with the series’ attractive female character Billie Newman (played by actress Linda Kelsey) and could not be convinced that she wasn’t a real person. He ultimately began committing a series of petty crimes in the hopes that Billie Newman would write a story on them but they only resulted in his getting a six month jail sentence where a brutal beating by a fellow inmate blocked any memory of Billie Newman from his mind. He did develop a short-lived crush on Ed Asner.
Hack wrote this while he was watching the finale of the TV show “Friends.” When he got bored halfway through, it devolved into a description of sexual fantasies he had with some of his middle school teachers. It was a smash hit in Arkansas.
This book was inspired by the famous “Seinfeld” episode “The Yada Yada” in which Elaine (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) conversationally edits a story about a sexual encounter with “yada yada…I never heard from him again.” After writing dozens of unanswered angry letters to the producers of “Seinfeld” demanding to know the details of what she “yada yadaed” over, Hack wrote his version of what happened which was just 139 pages of sordid sexual encounters between the character and a series of men, women and animals who inexplicably show up at her apartment. It won Hack a National Book Award.
Hack’s forays into sci-fi are infrequent but usually rewarding. This one has Lieutenant Uhura of “Star Trek” jumping ship at the end of the movie where they go back to the twentieth century to save whales so that she can continue her love affair with a Hack Werker-like writer of pulp fiction novels who she met while Captain Kirk was off hitting on a hot marine biologist.
