The autobiography of Alice Cooper as told to Steven Gaines

ME, HOOD! YOU, CORPSE! The bodies were piling up like basketball points, but the name of this game was Mafia Murder. The punks, the junkies and the hookers were running scared, and the police weren’t far behind them. Then some smart cop got an idea which would either make him Commissioner or get him kicked off the force: Con the coolest hood in New York onto the Department payroll and send him out to do his own violent thing in the name of law and order. The bait: ten grand, a beautiful bitch begging to be tamed — and a license to bag all the corpses he can shoot... DOUBLE-BARRELLED SPILLANE: ME, HOOD! and RETURN OF THE HOOD, two new pulse-racers never before published in the U.S. They’re vintage Spillane — brutal, sexy, unbeatable

The unnamed narrator of this slim, alluring novel recalls a summer spent at age sixteen on an idyllic Italian island off the coast of Naples in the 1950s, where he spends his days with Nicola, a local fisherman. The narrator falls in love with Caia, who shares with him that she’s Jewish, saved by Italian soldiers from the Nazis, who killed the rest of her Yugoslav family. The boy demands answers about the war from the adults around him, but is rebuffed by everyone but Nicola, who tells him of Italy’s complicity with the Nazis. His passion for Caia and his ardent patriotism lead him to a flamboyant, cataclysmic act of destruction that brings his tale to an end