Nearly 30 years ago I bought the paperback copy collection with some of Charles Beaumont’s short stories. Published by Tor Books, The Howling Man‘s pages now are yellowed with age, and smells of dust and decaying paper. This book originally was published in hardcover by small press, Dark Harvest, and entitled Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories. It appeared nearly 30 years after Beaumont’s untimely death at the age of 37, from early-onset Alzheimers. What a cruel fate.
Last month I happened upon the Dark Harvest book in Lawrence Person’s book catalog, and bought it along plus a couple other older books, plus a much more recently published novel, the latter by Lewis Shiner. Re-reading Beaumont’s stories, now 30 years after the original publication, is both enjoyable and depressing. It’s enjoyable because the stories are brilliantly written, but depressing because almost all the writers who wrote introductions to the stories, are now dead as well. Most of those writers knew Beaumont personally: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Robert Bloch, William F. Nolan, Roger Corman, and more. Some of the people writing introductions are more famous than Beaumont, in large part because of Beaumont’s early death, so many years ago.
Beaumont wrote actively only for a short dozen or so years. He was a well-known writer in his lifetime, appearing in Playboy, writing teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, and writing movie scripts for Hollywood. Today, few people new to the SF field likely will have heard of him. I know of only other Beaumont book published in the past 30 years, and it appeared in 2000: A Touch of the Creature was published by Subterranean Press, limited to 1000 copies, and collected mostly unpublished and early tales. Maybe if I dig a bit on the internet I might find other books, likely equally limited to the small press if they exist.
Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories includes a lengthy introduction by editor Roger Anker, and brief note from Beaumont’s son, before leading off with a Ray Bradbury introduction to a truly eerie story, “Miss Gentibelle”. Could anyone dare to write one like this today? I think not.
There are 29 other stories in the book, 30 in all. These range from humorous to dark, science fiction to fantasy. All are tales of the imagination. Some are rooted in the mid-century, while others feel timeless.
A few years ago, a documentary was produced, called “The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man.”
There’s also a Charles Beaumont memorial, also on YouTube.
Hopefully Beaumont won’t be forgotten. Though I see Bradbury books often in bookstores, most of the other big-name authors whose names appear in this book have long since disappeared from the publishing world, remembered only by name, found only occasionally in used bookstores. The publishing world is a cruel one: tough to break into, and quickly to forget fame.
