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Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories, by Charles Beaumont
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The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer.
It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension.
Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes. Beaumont dreamed up fantasies so vast and varied, they burst through the walls of whatever box might contain them. Supernatural, horror, noir, science fiction, fantasy, pulp, and more - all were equally at home in his wondrous mind. These are stories where lions stalk the plains, classic cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the devil himself. With dizzying feats of master storytelling and joyously eccentric humor, Beaumont transformed his nightmares and reveries into impeccably crafted stories that leave themselves indelibly stamped upon the walls of the mind. In Beaumont's hands, nothing is impossible; it all seems plausible, even likely.
- Sales Rank: #82317 in Audible
- Published on: 2016-01-21
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 740 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
A nice Beaumont Sampler including several Twilight Zone stories
By Jordan P.
Charles Beaumont is a five-star talent and hopefully this Penguin Classics retrospective of his work will go a long way to bring his fine work to a wider audience. Unfortunately, this collection, due to some questionable omissions, is only partially successful in encompassing the best of his work, and I can't imagine the goal would have been otherwise since the author's work hasn't been in print in nearly twenty years and is unlikely to remain in print hereafter.
The best part of this collection is that it includes seven stories that were later adapted for television on Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, almost all of which were adapted by Beaumont himself for the show. For those interested, these stories are: "The Howling Man," "The Jungle," "Perchance to Dream," "In His Image," "The Beautiful People" (filmed as "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" from a teleplay by John Tomerlin), "Song for a Lady" (filmed as "Passage on the Lady Anne"), and "Traumerei" (filmed as "Shadow Play").
This collection should also have included the stories, "The Devil, You Say?" and "Elegy," both of which were also adapted for the show by Beaumont, "The Devil, You Say?" as "Printer's Devil," for no other reason than to completely collect the Beaumont stories associated with the show. The collection also neglects one of Beaumont's finer stories that is also connected to Twilight Zone, "Gentlemen, Be Seated," which Beaumont also adapted into a teleplay and submitted to the Zone before, incredibly, it was rejected for production by the show's fifth season producer. It would have been interesting to have all of this Twilight Zone material in one collection since his connection to the show is the primary reason he is remembered and read today.
Along with the Twilight Zone material, this collection also includes many of Beaumont's finest stories. I would direct the reader to "A Death in the Country," a suspense story about one of Beaumont's favorite pastimes, auto racing, "Free Dirt," a surreal and highly original horror story, "Place of Meeting," a clever horror/science fiction short-short, "Night Ride," about another of Beaumont's passions, jazz music, "The New People," a tense story of domestic terror, "Last Rites," an examination of religion through a science fiction lens, and "The Magic Man," a heart-wrenching story about the power of belief.
There are included some stories that don't show Beaumont at his best but were presumably included to both fill out the collection and show a little of the author's range. These include "Fritzchen," and "The Monster Show," two satirical fantasies, and "A Classic Affair," and "The Music of the Yellow Brass," two marginally successful non-genre stories.
Alas, the collection also include some poor stories, such as "Sorcerer's Moon," "You Can't Have Them All," "Father, Dear Father," "Blood Brother," and "The New Sound." What's baffling about the inclusion of these stories is what was left out of the collection so that they could be included. Left out were essential stories such as "Miss Gentilbelle," Beaumont's devastating tale of the horrors of a twisted childhood, "The Hunger," an intense noir tale, "Black Country," a prize winning story about the power of jazz music, "Mourning Song," a powerful dark fantasy about choice and destiny, and "The Vanishing American," his classic fantasy about the effects of American society on the identity of the individual. If the reader enjoyed this collection I highly recommend they seek out these stories as they are better than almost everything else included in this collection and are stories that I, as a longtime Beaumont reader, feel are stories that simply must be included for a one-volume collection of the author's work to be considered definitive. I'm at least hoping this means there is a proposed second volume in the future that will collect the remainder of Beaumont's wonderful short fiction.
Overall, this is an fine primer on Beaumont's unique style but ultimately it's a missed opportunity to collect all of Beaumont's best work in one easily accessible collection. I highly suggest Beaumont biographer/editor Roger Anker's 1988 volume "Selected Stories" (Dark Harvest), reprinted in paperback as "The Howling Man" (Tor 1992). It includes all of Beaumont's best work as well as personal essays by Beaumont's professional friends. Get it while it's still relatively affordable, for it remains at this time the definitive collection of Beaumont's wonderful short fiction.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Pure Halloween fun.
By G. M. Warnken
The phrase that immediately comes to mind to describe Beaumont is "a poor man's Ray Bradbury", but that's entirely too derogatory for this collection of tales. Beaumont's prose can't equal Bradbury's ecstatic, beautiful collections of metaphors and descriptions—it has a distinctly hard-boiled edge, as though his style was unable to escape the pulps to the same degree that Bradbury's did. However, his sense of twisted fun and near-endless ability to come up with damn good "What if?" ideas are equal to that of his more famous counterpart; in that regard many of these stories would be perfectly at home in The Illustrated Man or The October Country. And he does have Bradbury's gift for evoking nostalgia and emotion; to name but one example, the aching, awful sadness of "The Magic Man" is genuinely moving.
What a talent we lost when he died; who knows how many more wonderful little tales and Twilight Zone episodes he would have graced us with. While Ligotti is certainly more impressive in a literary sense, this was, no contest, my favorite Halloween read this October.
Also, this will undoubtedly be the only time you'll see a collection bookended by tributes from Ray Bradbury and William Shatner. An apt duo, though I'm unclear where the Bradbury foreword came from as he'd been dead for three years prior to the publication of this edition. I like to think he has indeed succeeded in his goal to live forever and has been in contact with Penguin Classics from the afterlife.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Wonderful New Collection From Penguin Classics
By s.ferber
If the name "Charles Beaumont" strikes a familiar chord with you, it is likely because you have seen that name in the opening or end credits of any number of popular entertainments. Beaumont was the screenwriter for the 1958 sci-fi shlock classic "Queen of Outer Space," "The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao," and the Roger Corman films "The Premature Burial," "The Intruder" (featuring William Shatner's finest performance ever, sez me), "The Haunted Palace" and "The Masque of the Red Death." More likely, however, you have seen his name at the ending of various episodes of the classic television program "The Twilight Zone"; Beaumont contributed 22 screenplays to the series, more than his buddies Richard Matheson (15) and (the very recently departed) George Clayton Johnson (5), but of course far, far fewer than series host Rod Serling's almost superhuman tally of 88 of the program's 151 shows. Fewer people, perhaps, know that Beaumont was also an author, with dozens of short stories and two novels to his credit. The new collection from Penguin Classics, however, may help bring Beaumont's skills as an author to a wider audience. Entitled "Perchance to Dream," the collection brings 23 stories together in one 300+-page collection, from the 10-year period 1952 – ’61.
As it turns out, this is a very wide-ranging collection, with stories in many genres. Most impressively, Beaumont changes his style of writing, seemingly effortlessly, to match any one particular story. Some of the tales are simply written, while others feature lush, almost poetical turns of phrase. Some of the tales are humorous; others quite grim. Many feature surprising plot twists; others are more straightforward. All, however, are supremely well-written little gems; there's nary a clinker in the bunch, although some are of course more successful and memorable than others. The collection also includes seven stories (although the book's back cover says five) that Beaumont later transformed into "TZ" episodes, and that fact alone should make this new volume a must-purchase for all fans of that legendary series.
As for the stories themselves, they can be divided into perhaps five discrete categories. First up, we have the straightforward Science Fiction tale, such as "Father, Dear Father," in which a man invents a time machine to see what will happen if he should kill his own Dad before he is conceived; "In His Image" (turned into a one-hour episode of "TZ" seven years later), in which a man visits his hometown, only to find that nobody remembers him; "The Monster Show," dealing with a futuristic TV program that turns out to be...well, perhaps I'd better say no more; "The Beautiful People," in which a homely 18-year-old girl shocks society in general by refusing to undergo state-mandated plastic surgery (recast by Beaumont 12 years later as the "TZ" ep "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"); and "Last Rites," in which a mechanical man asks a priest to confer Extreme Unction on his dying robotic body.
And then there is the type of tale in which Science Fiction is combined with a decided leavening of Horror. Examples of this hybrid tale here are "The Jungle" (transformed considerably into a "TZ" episode seven years later), where the builder of a futuristic city in the wilds of Kenya is terrorized by the local natives; "Fritzchen," a truly bizarre (and bizarrely written) tale of a very strange pet; and "Place of Meeting," where we find the last residents of a devastated Earth, and learn something of their macabre background.
The collection also offers up a half dozen tales that are most assuredly out-and-out Horror. To this bunch belong the title story, "Perchance to Dream" (transformed into a "TZ" ep one year later), in which a man is convinced that he will soon be killed by a woman in his daily nightmares (a somewhat confusing denouement mars this one for me, a bit); "The Howling Man" (turned into a popular "TZ" ep a year later), in which an ailing American is tended to in a German monastery and hears the cries of a very peculiar prisoner (a beautifully written tale that is far superior to its TV incarnation); "Blood Brother," in which a vampire tells his daily woes to a (seemingly) sympathetic shrink; "Free Dirt," suggested by Beaumont's buddy Ray Bradbury, in which one of the world's most parsimonious men, Mr. Aorta, makes a big mistake in carting home some gratis cemetery soil; "The New People," in which the friendly neighbors of a newly arrived young couple turn out to be hiding a dreadful secret (one of the grisliest stories in the collection, and one of my favorites); and "The New Sound," which tells of the decidedly peculiar hobby of one Mr. Goodhew: a "necroaudiophile." Don’t ask!
Charles Beaumont also wrote stories that smack of pure Fantasy. Examples of this genre to be found in the collection are "Sorcerer's Moon," which tells of a modern-day war being waged between two wizards; and "Traumerei" (recast, seven years later, as the "TZ" ep "Shadow Play"), in which a man who has been condemned to death in the electric chair is convinced that the world will end when he does.
Finally, this wonderful collection gives us seven more tales that must be termed Unclassifiable: tales that belong to no particular genre, but that are all wonderfully interesting pieces of short literature. First up we have "You Can’t Have Them All," in which a young man uses various computers to find and select all the most beautiful women in the world, and then goes about the task of bedding all 563 of them! (Granted, perhaps this story might be more appropriately labeled a Fantasy piece!) This is a genuinely amusing tale that turns a bit uncomfortably icky, with our protagonist using herbal concoctions to, in essence, "date rape" each of his conquests. I just knew this tale had to have first appeared in "Playboy" (Beaumont's 1954 piece "Black Country," not included in this collection, was the first short story to appear in the magazine), and as it turns out, it was, indeed; in the August '56 issue.
Other, equally Unclassifiable tales in this volume are "A Classic Affair," in which a husband falls in love with, and has an affair of sorts with...a vintage Duesenburg automobile; "Song for a Lady," a remarkably lovely story in which a young couple honeymoons aboard an old ship's final transatlantic voyage (transformed by Beaumont, three years later, into the one-hour "TZ" ep "Passage on the Lady Anne"); "The Magic Man," a Western of sorts but told in a Bradbury-like manner, in which a magician and his elderly black assistant visit a small town in Kansas in the 1800s; "The Music of the Yellow Brass," the story of a young, would-be matador in modern-day Mexico that comes off almost like a Hemingway piece; "A Death in the Country," a tale of modern-day stock-car racing, and a surprisingly suspenseful and gripping affair, even for those (like me) who couldn't care less about the sport (we know, by the title, that a death will be coming, but just whose death it is might surprise you); and finally, "Night Ride," a story concerning a 1950s jazz combo and the strange secret of its success, told using a remarkable amount of hepcat slang.
So there you have it...23 wonderful pieces from an author whose life was tragically cut short in its prime. (Beaumont, sadly, passed away in 1967, at age 38, of what is today believed to have been early-onset Alzheimer's disease.) This new Penguin collection, with a foreword by Bradbury and an afterword by Shatner, and featuring beautiful artwork on the front cover by Will Sweeney, provides us with a marvelous opportunity to get acquainted--or reacquainted--with this overlooked author. It comes more than highly recommended by yours truly....
(This review, by the way, originally appeared on the Fantasy Literature website...a most excellent destination for all fans of this type of fare....
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