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.

The Chic Spies

Chic Spy Day, which was created by Mignon Gould of the fashion website The Chic Spy, celebrates James Bond and similar fictional chic spies of film and television. Since there are few things Hack loves more than writing James Bond rip-offs, he took advantage of the gala to crank out this hodgepodge, an almost word-for-word copy of Diamonds Are Forever that led to his biggest plagiarism lawsuit yet.

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.