Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was a prolific American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer\'s Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, among them 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder and The Masque of the Red Death. Novelist Dean R. Koontz has said, "Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Charles Beaumont\'s classic story, "The Beautiful People," was originally published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, September 1952.

From Publishers Weekly In his brief career, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) turned out several score of stories in a variety of moods, styles and genres. Most of the 30 selections collected herefive never before publishedare introduced by one or another of Beaumont's friends and colleagues, including Ray Bradbury (Beaumont's writing teacher, whose influence is easily detected), Richard Matheson (who, like Beaumont, scripted many Twilight Zone episodes), Ray Russell, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and filmmaker Roger Corman. The stories are varied and wonderful; "Miss Gentilbelle," a woman who thinks men are beasts, is raising her son as a girl; "The Vanishing American" features a man who is saved from his meaningless life by an act of whimsy; "Free Dirt" is a cautionary little chiller about uncontrolled greed; and "Black Country" is an evocative, weird tale of life in the jazz world. Editor Anker has contributed an excellent biographical introduction. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Tragically short-lived, unjustly forgotten, yet remarkably talented, the literary voice of Charles Beaumont resonates from beyond the grave in this collection. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Beaumont's bewitching work appeared in Playboy, Esquire, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others, and he earned a reputation as a raconteur par excellence. He died prematurely in 1967 at the age of thirty-eight, a victim of Alzheimer's Disease, and his name faded into relative obscurity. in this long overdue tribute, editor Anker has gathered thirty Beaumont tales, including five previously unpublished. When Beaumont is at his best, as he is here, it's hard to imagine the stories being written any better. Take, for example "Miss Gentilbelle," an unsettling tale of a small boy whose mother's intense hatred of men drives her to dress and treat her son as a girl; "The Devil, You Say," a tongue-in-cheek relating of Satan getting his hooves wet in the newspaper business; "Free Dirt," in which the penny-pinching protagonist's greed leads him eagerly to cart off the soil of the title, but eventually gets him in over his head; "Me Howling Man," another tale involving the devil, this time detailing his release from a monastic prison by an unwitting accomplice and the havoc that eventually ensues; 'The Crooked Man," a thought-provoking futuristic tale of test-tube breeding gone awry and the resultant conversion to "heterophobia"; "Night Ride," a musing on the capacity of sadness to infuse musicians' work, and of the fine line between happiness and total despair that the player must walk in order to maintain that inspired level of performance. As Harlan Ellison states in his introduction to "The Howling Man," "No one-not critics or savants of semiotics or even readers of the most sensitive sort-can know how good Chuck Beaumont was at putting words on paper.... Chuck Beaumont was truly one in a million." That's not just hype, that's the truth. Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories comes very highly recommended. -- From Independent Publisher

The Supreme Court has ordered an end to racially segregated schools, and folks in the predominantly white Southern town of Caxton are prepared grudgingly to comply with the ruling. But when Adam Cramer, a handsome and smooth-talking young man, arrives in town and begins to make incendiary speeches and stoke the flames of racial prejudice, the situation quickly turns deadly. Who is Cramer, and what is the sinister truth behind his real agenda? As tensions build and violence flares, it all leads to an explosive and surprising conclusion! As compelling and relevant today as when first published, Charles Beaumont's The Intruder (1959) has lost none of its power to shock, and modern readers will find Cramer's bigoted rhetoric eerily familiar in light of today's civil rights debates. Beaumont (1929-1967), better known for his Twilight Zone scripts and his weird and brilliant short fiction, earned widespread acclaim for this novel, which was adapted for a...

"Would you mind repeating that?" "I said, sir, that Mr. Friden said, sir, that he sees a city." "A city?" "Yes sir." Captain Webber rubbed the back of his hand along his cheek. "You realize, of course, that that is impossible?" He called for the astronomer who'd sighted the thing. Frieden wasn't joking. It was a city, and it was impossible: an asteroid in space where no asteroid should have been -- and there on it, plainly visible, was a city that could only have existed back on Earth!

'This is first class' The Times'A stunning debut' Maxim Jakubowski, Crime Time'A marvellously confident debut, sharply observed and exceptionally well written' Charles Cumming, author of Box 88Everyone knows about the Cambridge Spies from the Fifties, identified and broken up after passing national secrets to the Soviets for years. But no spy ring was ever unearthed at Oxford. Because one never existed? Or because it was never found...?2022: Former spy Simon Sharman is eking out a living in the private sector. When a commission to delve into the financial dealings of a mysterious Russian oligarch comes across his desk, he jumps at the chance.But as Simon investigates, worrying patterns begin to emerge. His subject made regular trips to Oxford, but for no apparent reason. There are payments from offshore accounts that suddenly just... stop.Has he found what none of his...

When The Hunger and Other Stories (1957) appeared, it heralded the arrival of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) as an important and highly original new voice in American fiction. Although he is best known today for his television and film scripts, including several classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Beaumont is being rediscovered as a master of weird tales, and this, his first published collection, contains some of his best. Ranging in tone from the chilling Gothic horror of "Miss Gentilbelle," where an insane mother dresses her son up as a girl and slaughters his pets, to deliciously dark humor in tales like "Open House" and "The Infernal Bouillabaisse," where murderers' plans go disastrously awry, these seventeen stories demonstrate Beaumont's remarkable talent and versatility. This new edition of The Hunger and Other Stories, the first in more than fifty years, includes a new introduction by Dr. Bernice M. Murphy, who argues for reconsideration of...

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...

In his brief career, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) turned out several score of stories in a variety of moods, styles and genres. Most of the 30 selections collected herefive never before publishedare introduced by one or another of Beaumont's friends and colleagues, including Ray Bradbury (Beaumont's writing teacher, whose influence is easily detected), Richard Matheson (who, like Beaumont, scripted many Twilight Zone episodes), Ray Russell, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and filmmaker Roger Corman. The stories are varied and wonderful; "Miss Gentilbelle," a woman who thinks men are beasts, is raising her son as a girl; "The Vanishing American" features a man who is saved from his meaningless life by an act of whimsy; "Free Dirt" is a cautionary little chiller about uncontrolled greed; and "Black Country" is an evocative, weird tale of life in the jazz world. Editor Anker has contributed an excellent biographical introduction. 

Charles Beaumont's untimely death in 1967 at age 38 cut short the brief but brilliant career of a writer now regarded as a master of modern weird fiction. The author of three extraordinary collections of short stories, the acclaimed novel The Intruder, and scripts for cult classic horror films and the popular TV series The Twilight Zone, Beaumont was at work on a fourth collection at the end of his life. The contents of that book, which he hoped to title A Touch of the Creature, remained unpublished until a limited hardcover edition in 2000, now long out-of-print. Ranging in tone from the eerie and unsettling "The Indian Piper" and "Time and Again" to the offbeat and humorous "Adam's Off Ox" and "The Junemoon Spoon", these stories reveal previously unknown sides to this talented writer and will not disappoint any fan of Beaumont's work. This edition includes all fourteen tales from the limited hardcover edition, along with three additional...