Flight from the Grave

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Having just read the last few words of Robert J. Hogan\u2019s, Flight from the Grave in the quite
appropriate June issue of G-8 and his
Battle Aces on this hot June night, this reader is transposed to a night
sixty years ago, on an identical hot June night where from above I see myself
walking along the dim streets of Home,
a stack of pulps, purchased at Dick\u2019s Used Books, clutched in my arm as I make
my may in the streetlight and light of storefronts to my attic apartment on
Second Street where supreme pleasure is to be found in the pages awaits me; a
kind of Raskolnikov enclosure with
slanted ceilings, meager furnishing and the enchanted cot where the pages will
induce the reverie. Little did I know that Betsy would tell me that on the hour
of 12:00 midnight, the living die in sleep and the dead awaken. And so my dead
self, eyes filled with the plaster swirls in the ceiling becomes alive as in a
long ago.

In such a state one is left all alone, the only contacts the
cool, moist air, the hard street and the gradually diminished stage with utter
blackness above, where the stars are lost in a dim vapor. I walk by the Variety
Stores (now long gone) and stop at the front entrance, open the door to the
long stairwell, and trudge with muffled steps to the entrance to my room.
Beside my cot on a wooden box serving as a table are the pulps of other
evenings now providing a different succor, yet still cherished forever. I am
sixteen, finishing the last years of High School, where teachers provide
glimpses of a world I have never experienced so I have no memories to make
sense of what I study. Ahead lurks an abyss, where everything is different. I
have been told that the \u201cpulps\u201d are trash,; yet I crave them for their effects
on evenings such as these; effects, which might disappear forever, save on
Friday evenings such as these. From my single window I see the darkened
buildings and street of the neighborhood, in memory always recreated as from
above; then, to my cot and escape
from the repetitive world of other people into that special world created by
the mystique of Robert J. Hogan and few others out of the one thousand clustered in New York, the epicenter of the miraculous origin of the Pulps. Soon he and that world
will be gone as well, except to be recreated by the magic of the few remaining, disintegrating pulps.

The mind state so created gradually develops as the evening
progresses and the conscious mind withdraws; and from the shadows creeps the tangible, intensively personal world of the, ME. The pulps provided by Dick from his cellar storage are unique
\u2013 the \u201cfeel of the book\u201d, the enchantment of the indicia, smell of the pulp
paper, the ads and inducements for future issues, and the like, are to be found
nowhere else; they are the souvenirs to induce this special mental state of
enchantment. Indeed, no Time Machine is needed.

How effective on this night was the June 1. 1937 issue of, G-8 and His Battle Aces, especially
Hogan\u2019s, Flight from the Grave the
featured seventy-four page novel? (I doubt my English teachers would have
called it a novel.)

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