MURDEROUS HUMOR

Hackworth might have made a little money back on his investment, selling it through book clubs at twenty cents a copy, but three very venomous reviews nailed the coffin lid down tight. The old adage of, “Be nice to people you meet on the way up, because you’ll meet them on the way down,” seemed to have slipped from Hackworth’s memory. Three of those people had returned with a vengeance of their own. Well, they really hadn’t gone anywhere. Hackworth and his three nemeses all lived within two city blocks of one another, in the swank district known as Sutton Terrace. No poor people allowed. In fact, the tenants didn’t even know how to spell the word poor.

Nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, Duxbury Daggs, was the first to skewer Hackworth and his scribbling in a long, merciless diatribe. His kindest comments came at the end of the piece: “If Gutenberg had known people were going to write books like this, he would have killed himself instead of inventing the printing press.” And: “How sad it is that Ellsworth Hackworth forgot to bite down really hard on a cyanide capsule before beginning this novel.”

But Duxbury Daggs wasn’t a literary genius himself, or even a book lover. He didn’t have a single book in any of the fourteen rooms of his luxurious apartment. He was a skinny, beanpole of a man with a face that looked like it belonged at the top of a totem pole. What kept him alive—made him get out of bed every morning—was his lust for destroying people’s careers. He loved the smell of blood and the pursuit of the wounded.

Brendan Gayheart, book reviewer number two, was editor and owner of the magazine, Literary Genius. He mostly published his own writings in it. His favorite section of the magazine was the one he wrote called Writers Undigested. Here various authors were crucified worse than Christ had been. Gayheart never liked to read anything he hadn’t written, or talk to anyone he couldn’t fire, so after listening patiently to a synopsis of Hackworth’s novel, recited by a sniveling assistant, Gayheart rushed to his computer, wearing only his purple satin pajamas, gold slippers and red beret and composed a full magazine page of death and destruction.

“First, the title of this so-called novel should have been, Gone With the Garbage,” began Gayheart’s review. “If the entire, unending twelve hundred pages of this catastrophe had been printed on toilet paper people would have gotten some use out of it.” From then on Gayheart was extremely unkind.

But TV entertainment reporter, Doralee Thornbag wasn’t about to be outdone by her colleagues. Every morning, at the breakfast table, she read the obituary pages, hoping to find Gayheart’s and Daggs’s names there. But she hated Hackworth more. Years ago he had referred to her as that little, sawed-off, frog-eyed witch, who’s had so many facelifts her eyebrows are on top of her head. Since Doralee doesn’t handle criticism very well, it was payback time. She proceeded to take Hackworth’s career and drop it from the top of the Empire State Building.

After putting on a two thousand dollar dress, and troweling on ten pounds of makeup, she sat herself before the TV cameras and shredded two years of writing in two minutes—ending with: “Was Ellsworth Hackworth trying to psych us out with his title? Was he trying to make us think Gone With a Vengeance was another Gone With the Wind? If Atlanta catches on fire again, hopefully Hackworth’s book will be the first thing incinerated. Have a wonderful, wonderful evening. This has been entertainment with Doralee.”