Concertina Madness

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.

The Frozen Head

Hack tried to make some quick money with this novelization of the Professor Morlock horror film franchise but it became a typical Hack Werker novel instead, with incoherent rants about his violent father and random scenes depicting anal sex. Morlock purists consider it among the best books in the series.

The Ballot Box

This is a surprisingly powerful statement about government complacency over gun violence in the United States. Hack was stunned to learned that it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction but came short in the voting because of all the anal sex scenes.

Reefer Fiends

The urban legend of the stoned babysitter who puts an infant in a microwave oven comes from this 1975 novel, which Hack swears was not only true but that he was the baby in question. But since Hack was born in 1940 and the first microwave oven wasn’t invented until 1946, we suspect that he was stoned on reefer when he “remembered” it.

Manly Men Doing Man Things/Jesse Merlin: Super Solider

Hack based the second story in this two-parter on his cover artist Jonny M.’ friend, the renowned opera singer Jesse Merlin. When Hack badgered Jonny to introduce him, Hack said afterwards that “I was so overcome by Merlin’s masculine charm that it was the one time I would have willingly gone gay with another man.” Hack had, of course, unwillingly gone gay on countless occasions.

Ménage á Trois

This was originally written in 1965 when two waitresses at the Shakey’s pizza parlor he was the night janitor at conned him into believing that they wanted a 3-way with him when all they really wanted was the use of his van in the pizzeria parking lot to engage in illicit lesbian sex. They locked Hack out of the van as soon as they got inside and while it rocked violently back and forth, he wrote this novel in his head.

The two waitresses spent twenty years as Catholic nuns and are now married to each other and run a feminist bookstore in Portland, Oregon.