Gulp! Merritt of the Pulps, I presume?

I met the ghost of the late Abraham Merritt on the Hornby Road pavement in 1954. I was 18 then and he had been dead and gone for 11 years. I used to go there frequently to hunt for bargain book buys. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. I distinctly remember picking up at least three of his novels: The Moon Pool, Burn Witch Witch! and Seven Footprints to Satan. All of them were paperbacks published by Avon Books, an imprint I don’t come across much these days. I was a total genre-illiterate then. (In fact, I doubt if I even knew the meaning of ‘genre’.) What probably attracted me to Merritt was the back cover blurb extravagantly promising weird and mind-blowing story lines in the comics/pulp novel style. In hindsight, I was a pulp junkie back then without quite knowing the name of my ailment. Recently when I saw the movies of The Shadow and The Phatom on the idiot box, I got a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Now I know why. I used to be a regular visitor to the pulp realm once upon a time, see? If memory serves, The Moon Pool is an expedition-into-a-lost-world fantasy in the best escapist tradition – contrary to the sci-fi genre tag on the back cover of its Collier Books edition which I subsequently purchased probably at the Strand Book Stall out of sheer nostalgia but haven’t so far read. Burn Witch Witch! is a horror novel about witchcraft while Seven Footprints to Satan combines horror with mystery and detection. At the time of reading Merritt, I used to be also a regular watcher of the B-Grade black and white sci-fi movies with flying saucers and alien invaders in them. I don’t think I ever thought they were in the same category as Merritt’s alternative worlds. Not having read H Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I also did not make the connection between them and Merritt. Project Gutenberg considers The Moon Pool meritorious enough to deserve an inclusion. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/765. (The novel was written in 1919. Merritt’s second wife, Eleanor, renewed the copyright in 1947. Now it seems to be out of copyright – which explains the sudden upsurge of interest among publishers to bring out special editions such as the University of Nebraska Press's Bison Frontiers of the Imagination Edition, for example.) P.S.: Considering that I was a flying saucer flick fan, I should have been reading Ralph 124C 41+, the sci-fi novel by the so-called ‘father of science fiction’, Hugo Gernsback. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. It is said to contain predictions of wondrous inventions to come including electronic music, fluorescent lighting, glass skyscrapers, helicopter buses, jet planes, jukeboxes, liquid fertilizer, loud speakers, micro-film, night baseball, organ transplants, plastics, radar, radio directional-finder, radio and television networks, solar power, stainless steel, synthetic fabrics, tape recorders, tear gas, the word "television", tin foil, vending machines and voice prints. As things turned out, I could not have read Hugo Gernsback’s magnum opus. Its debut was in a serialized format in the world's first radio magazine, Modern Electrics in 1911 in the US and I guess it was never brought out as a solo novel except recently in tandem with a Merritt trio. http://www.handango.com/avantgo-channel/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=141&platformId=2&productType=2&productId=161163&sectionId=3700&catalog=30&topSectionId=-1 .

Revealed at last! My shameful neurotic past.

I was 18 and in the second year of college when I became convinced that I was neurotic. Having just read an American paperback on the subject (I cannot for the life of me remember its title and author), I had come to the conclusion that every young American worth his or her salt had neurois and had undergone long drawn psychoanalysis for it. In fact, I thought it was a rather chic and smart malady to suffer from. I continued to read pop psychology and search for labels for my neurosis. Like a true hypochondriac, I used to imagine a whole gamut of typical symptoms in myself such as vague unease, wakefulness, a forlorn feeling of loss and foreboding and the meaninglessness of life. I used to walk up and down on the terrace above our third floor flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for a long time at night on the pretext of a constitutional. My neurosis library was built from books bought on the pavement of Hornby Road. I also used to borrow from a comics wallah at Lamington Road a pseudo medical and slyly prurient magazine from the US, quaintly called Sexology. Started by Hugo Gernsback – after whom the Hugo Award for sci-fi is named – in the 1930s, it contained vaguely written gibberish about various maladies and conditions and was full of scientific seeming line drawings. I used to borrow and browse through every issue religiously as soon as my comics wallah got it. I don’t think I read many articles in their entirety, though. (To add a cloak and dagger flavour to the whole affair, he used to always cover it with a newspaper before handing it over to me.) I had also got into the habit of reading a slim DIY magazine called Psychology. After a couple of years of all this, I slowly got out of my delusional mode and, somewhere along the way, came to realise the utter sham of the whole thing. Today, I am of the firm opinion that all the so-called angst, anxiety, low self-esteem and resultant suffering that people bitch about are mostly bogus and self-manufactured and the therapeutic ‘help’ industry is a vast money-making racket. The whole self-delusion is created by unrealistic over-expectation, greed, jealousy and an obstinate refusal to call a spade a spade. I fully agree with what Samuel Goldwyn had to say on the subject: "Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined." See what Sexology looked like: http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/healthandfitness/sexology. There’s a slide show of Sexology covers too at http://www.magazineart.org/main.php?g2_view=slideshow.Slideshow&g2_itemId=6961. To read an article from the magazine set to pop music from the sixties including Beatles, click here: http://www.samsloan.com/sexology.htm