Hack Like Me

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

If you have ever scanned headlines on the magazine rack in a supermarket
checkout line, chances are you have seen some of Harold Fiske’s work:
“Freeze Dry Your Dog!,” “Elvis is Alive—And Black!,” “Aliens
Have Landed and They Want to Have Sex!,” “There’s Gold Under That
Old Outhouse!” Yes, Harold Fiske is a tabloid reporter. Boldly probing
where mainstream journalists have gone before, Fiske has made the
acquaintances of hundreds of highly unusual people: a hair dresser for
corpses, a horse exorcist, mad scientists, a small army of Elvis
impersonators, and/or people who just let Elvis’s ghost use their body
whenever he feels lonesome tonight. Fisk is the first to admit that many
of these stories are a trifle weird, but who is he to pass judgment if
someone claims to be able to physically transform himself into a
dolphin?

Besides writing articles for the National Examiner, Fiske is also a
regular guest on the Saturday morning CBC radio program “Basic
Black,” where his host, Arthur Black, affectionately calls Fiske the
“Guru of the Gutter Press.” This is apparently a longstanding
relationship; in one of Fiske’s chapters, he meets a medium who claims
that Fiske and Black have met at least three times already in former
lives and that several hundred years ago Fiske was even Black’s
Mongolian love slave.

Oscar Wilde once quipped, “All of us are in the gutter but some of us
have our eyes on the stars.” Harold Fiske, on the other hand, looks
his gutter straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he sees. Even
if you think you aren’t the least bit interested in the world of
tabloid journalism, this book is irresistible with its combination of
irreverent humor and outrageous subject matter.