Charles Beaumont

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) was born on this date, January 2. A protege of Ray Bradbury, Beaumont wrote many of the classic scripts for the original Twilight Zone.

I first read Beaumont when I was a sophomore in high school. It was about the time we moved from one side of the state to the other to be closer to my grandmother. I had picked up a copy of Best of Beaumont, in part because of the introduction provided by Ray Bradbury.

I loved what I read. I’m not sure if I liked Beaumont (and Bradbury and Matheson and Nolan and etc.) because I love short fiction, of if I love short fiction because I like the work of these writers. I went on to track down everything I could find by Beaumont over the years.

For this post, I was going to reread “The Howling Man”.  So I got my copy of Best of Beaumont down from the shelf and opened it up. I was surprised to find the story wasn’t there.

Turns out I read it in The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories, which I’d picked up my first week of college. There was a bookstore where I went to college, while I had to leave town to go to a bookstore the last few years I was in high school. If you think a bookstore and the freedom to buy something at any time was a bad combination, you wouldn’t be far from wrong.

But I digress. I started poking around on ISFDB and realized that while I have all of Beaumont’s collections, they don’t have as much overlap as I thought.  Best of Beaumont has never been reprinted.

In 1988, a large collection, Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories, was published in which many of the stories had introductions written by writers who knew and/or admired Beaumont, writers such as Beaumont, Matheson, Ellison, Nolan, etc.  The stories here were primarily culled from Beaumont’s earlier collections The Hunger, Yonder, Night Ride, and The Magic Man. along with a few that hadn’t been reprinted before. Of these four collections, only The Hunger is currently in print. And a handful of the stories contained in them have not appeared in any other collections.

Selected Stories was reprinted in paperback in 1992 under the title The Howling Man.  Mass for Mixed Voices from Centipede Press a few years ago appears to be an expanded version of this book. It should be noted that Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories, the collection from Penguin Classics that is currently available is a mix of stories that can be found in Mass for Mixed Voices and Best of Beaumont.

A Touch of the Creature (1999) contained uncollected stories. It is available as an ebook.

And those are the available collections from Charles Beaumont and a brief history of his books.  Check him out if you haven’t yet.  I never got around to reading “The Howling Man” last night. I’ll try to get to it tonight.