Hypno-Boobs

Hack went to dinner with a platonic female friend who made the mistake of wearing a low-cut tank top, and Hack realized that he had been unknowingly staring at her cleavage while they talked. He couldn’t pin down how long his eyes were glued to her chest, but he figured it was somewhere between fifteen seconds and forty-five minutes, so he immediately went home and wrote this novel about how all men lose their rational mind at the glimpse of even the outline of a female mammary gland.

I’ll say this for the book; it’s medically accurate.

Dead Ringer

Everyone who’s been to a movie theater knows that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and came in third because they always project it as trivia on the screen to keep the audience from killing each other from boredom before the coming attractions start. Hack had one of his frequent mental breakdowns after being confronted by the tidbit yet again before a showing of Madame Web so for therapy, he wrote a novel around the story replacing Chaplin with Jonny M. and revolving it around a Russian plot to kill him and throw his hideously misshapen genitalia into a blender as a final ingredient to their formula for super atomic rocket fuel.

It made Hack feel much better.

Black Russian

When Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. was having a conversation with his friend, black standup comedian Dévyan DuMon, Dévyan went into a comic riff on racial matters and kept giving Jonny openings to join in. Jonny, being a wealthy, entitled lily-white, dude knew there was no goddamned way that he could say a word on the subject and curled up into a self-conscious pretzel, to Dévyan’s conspicuous amusement.

Hack loved hearing about Jonny’s anguish and wrote this Cold War espionage thriller to immortalize it. It sold well in Berkeley.