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Hack’s friend Eddie Frierson (see Mayonnaise is Nonsense) is an actor famous for a one-man show he performs about 16th century baseball player Christy Mathewson. When Frierson snubbed his nose at the coronavirus scare and performed the play in Los Angeles, Hack wrote this novel in tribute.
This Jonny M. adventure was based on the exploits of Jonny’s buddy James “Tree” Cleveland, an accomplished fiddler whose serenades to the ladies got him more poon tang than Hack got in his wildest dreams.Hack got so excited after finishing it that he took his kazoo to a nearby girl’s Catholic school and played old Tony Bennett songs on the physical education field until he was dragged off by police.
This was inspired by an evening when Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. and his pug Boris went to a karaoke bar and the women in the audience stormed the stage and sexually ravaged them after they performed a duet of the Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson hit “The Dog-Gone Girl is Mine.”
Hack’s obsession was still at it height after seeing Frances Fisher and Gregory Harrison perform James Goldman’s play. This book is nasty, even by Hack’s standards.
Hack was surprised to discover that his books sold well south of the border, so he wrote this one in Spanish using Google Translate with his musical crush Linda Ronstadt as the heroine. Sadly it sold poorly in Mexico (where it was considered incomprehensible) but it was an unexpected hit in Thailand.
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.
Hack originally wrote this book in 1960 as an unpublished manuscript titled “Horny Angels Come to Earth to Screw Horny Men,” but reworked it after his cover artist Jonny M. told him of his fondness of Ms. McLachlan’s music and especially her song “Angel.” Although Jonny created the cover for the rewrite because he was contractually obligated to, the pornographic nature of the novel drove a rift between the two men that took years to heal.
Kate Micucci is an actress known for her appearances on such TV shows as “The Big Bang Theory,” “Scrubs” and “Raising Hope,” and for her work with Riki Lindhome as the musical duo Garfunkel & Oates (named after second bananas from other famous musical duos). Hack developed an obsession for her after hearing their comedy song “The Loophole” about some Catholic girls getting around sacrificing their virginity with their boyfriends by engaging in anal sex. Since anal sex is one of the most prominent themes in Hack’s works, he wrote this novel in which Ms. Micucci knocks out John Oates with her ukulele and assumes his identity, taking her down a trail that is all too familiar to anyone who has read Hack’s books. Mercifully (as is frequently the case in his stories), Hack lost focus and the last hundred pages are just an angry rant about his father.
The book sold well within the Bible Belt.
A demented serial killer shows up at a Memorial Day barbeque and proceeds to murder everyone in attendance. Hack wrote this after going to a similar function at the home of his publisher John Kane and violently attacking his host after being told that they only had turkey burgers.
Hack attended a concert by a fiddle player named James Cleveland and became so hypnotized by the music that he showed up at Cleveland’s house that night for instructions on who Cleveland wanted him to kill. Hack wrote the outline for this book while he was waiting to be bailed out for that.