Selected
Stories by Charles Beaumont
304
pages, Penguin Classics
Review
by Pat Black
Charles
Beaumont is best known for writing at least 20 episodes of the original Twilight Zone TV series. Many of these
stemmed from his short stories, which are collected here for the first time in more
than a decade.
With
the words Twilight Zone you know what
you’re getting with Beaumont – pre-hippy era Americana, rock n’ roll (but only
just), fast cars, outrageously big suits, a spot of jazz, Jimmy Dean haircuts and,
most importantly, shocks.
The
author was a contemporary of Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson,
and Bradbury penned the introduction to this volume not long before his own death
in 2012. He paints a picture of an excitable young man, brimming with ideas and
desperate to set them down. The teenage Beaumont followed the older writers around
like a faithful puppy before his own career blossomed. While Bradbury hints
that the younger man may not have been the most talented writer in the celebrated
Los Angeles circle, he was certainly among the most warmly regarded.
He
also had no problems selling his work. Beaumont’s “Black Country” was the very
first short story ever published by Playboy,
which must have been fantastic news for millions of men who said they only ever
bought it for the writing. Later, his work in TV and films became familiar to
millions (The Masque of the Red Death
was among his writing credits for Roger Corman), before his potential was
cruelly snuffed out.
Perchance To Dream is mainly
weird fiction, with more than a few shock endings; you can count the band off
for the Twilight Zone theme at any
point.
The
title story opens the book, and it sets the tone with a riff on the paradoxical
superstition which holds that if we die in our dreams, we’ll die in real life.
Except, how would anyone know?
“The
Jungle” takes place in Bradbury country, with the world struck down by a
malaria-like virus which causes decomposition before people actually die. This
story’s narrator watches his wife succumb from within the super-city he
designed over the top of jungles and mountains. The indigenous people who had
to make way for the steel, glass and chrome monstrosity have supposedly cursed
the place; so the architect seeks the tribe out, following the beat of their
drums one night. This one was actually turned into a Twilight Zone episode, but I thought its final pay-off was a cheap
betrayal of an interesting idea.
“Sorcerer’s
Moon” looks at the last two warlocks on Earth battling for supremacy, an
intriguing contest with double-and-triple-crosses galore.
“You
Can’t Have Them All” was a little Roald Dahl in form and execution, as a
lothario computes exactly how he can go about sleeping with every example of
the type of woman he is attracted to on the planet. The story is a bit of a
relic, with a predatory view of women as conquests to be picked up and
discarded summarily, but it’s an engaging tale nonetheless.
Along
with the comedic “Blood Brother”, where a man who claims to be a vampire
complains to a shrink about his plight, “You Can’t Have Them All” was another example
of a two-hander set in a therapist’s office. It seems such a sign of the times,
to me, with neurotic Americans lying back on a leather couch and watching the
money roll out of their pockets. Do people still do this, or is it confined to
stories like this and old Woody Allen movies?
“Fritzchen”
was the weirdest story in the book, examining a child’s obsession with an odd
creature they find on a beach one day. The inevitable twist wasn’t a big surprise,
but the creature in the title invoked an oddly familiar sense of disgust, like
when you consider where the fly circling your ceiling might have come from.
“Father,
Dear Father” looks at another well-worn premise: what if you could travel back
in time, and killed your own father? Arthur C Clarke once postulated that all
of humanity is so closely linked genetically that, in terms of the progress of
millennia, the risks associated with killing anyone at all in your time travels
could be catastrophic for the whole of human progress - so it’s best to leave
your shooter at home. But despite the hardback premise, this story signed off with
a finale worthy of a dimestore paperback.
“The
Howling Man” is one of Beaumont’s best-known tales, and looks at a young
American travelling through a gothic-themed pre-war Germany. He discovers some
monks have imprisoned a man who they claim is the devil. Reason and logic tells
the American that he is dealing with the case of a man being locked up without
proper due process, for no good reason. Is it right to keep another human being
caged like that?
“A
Classic Affair” was breezy fun, looking at a man who has fallen in love with an
automobile in a used car lot. Perhaps imagining the same things as the reader,
his best friend is incredulous, but eventually sees an opportunity – as he, in
turn, has fallen in love with his friend’s wife. Hey – why doesn’t he buy the
car, and they can arrange a trade..?
“Place
of Meeting” was another end-of-the-world story which I didn’t really care for,
a Bradbury-style parable which wasn’t worth consideration here. “Song For A
Lady” was much better, following a pair of newlyweds as they take a berth on a
boat from the States to the UK. All the other passengers are elderly, and
there’s a sense that the couple have crashed a party they weren’t invited to…
“In
His Image” was a curious tale looking at a man who returns to his hometown with
his wife-to-be, only to find that no-one he meets can remember him. There is a sci-fi
reason behind the loss of identity, but the story splits off into a weird
split-personality tale with a good sharp jab right at the end.
“The
Monster Show” took a cynical look at television advertising and the box in the
corner’s habit of turning people into simple drones. We can never know what
Beaumont would have made of the internet, but thanks to this story we can make
an educated guess.
“The
Beautiful People” is an idea familiar to me from the comic strips of my youth –
and for all I know, their creators got it from Beaumont. In the future, a girl
is preparing for some brutal cosmetic surgery which will eradicate all her
bodily imperfections, seemingly a rite of passage for any teenager in this
particular era. Something in her rebels against this sense of aesthetic
conformity, though, no matter what the mean girls say. For “TV advertising” in
the story above, read “selfie generation” here.
“Free
Dirt” was the story of a cheapskate, a person who will not pay for anything if
he can help it. He’s a freeloader, a scavenger, and sometimes a downright fraud.
When he sees the substance in the title advertised, he can’t contain himself. I
wondered where this one was heading, but its shock ending felt well-earned as a
result.
And
so to the best tale in the book, the haunting “The Magic Man”, where a
travelling conjuror in the Old West decides one night to reveal to his paying
customers exactly how he performs his on-stage miracles. There’s no magic
whatsoever in this story, of course, except that which kindled within our
breast when we were excited, wild-eyed youngsters. Recalling that feeling
enhances this story’s rich, but melancholic flavour.
“Last
Rites” was another story which owed a lot to Uncle Ray, where a priest is
called to give unction to a dying friend. Now suppose, just suppose, that there
were such things as androids…
“The
Music of the Yellow Brass” sees a down-at-heel matador given the opportunity of
a lifetime in the bullring. The deal seems too good to be true, but at the
party the night before the fight there is wine, music… and a woman, of course.
I got the impression Beaumont was playing around with his Ernest Hemingway dolls
here, but the ending strikes exactly the note the author was striving for.
Perchance To Dream now
heads for a very strong climax, starting with “The New People”. An unsettling
examination of modern masculinity, it sees a young couple and their
incongruously odd child moving into a new house, and making friends with their
well-to-do neighbours. Nothing’s what it seems, of course.
Beaumont
was nearly 30 years ahead of David Lynch when it came to examining the pure
wickedness which might lie behind whitewashed picket fences, but this tale also
foreshadowed Ira Levin’s butterscotch and black magic diaboliques from Rosemary’s
Baby. Aside from that, there’s a curious sense of emasculation and
(literally) impotence. This story reminded me of those unpleasant moments in
life when you it turns out you have invited a total, unapologetic boor into
your house, and whatever manners you were raised with gradually give way to
something else.
“A
Death In The Country” concerns the world of motor racing, but the very fact of
its existence was reminiscent of my childhood notion of what a writer’s job
entailed. Beaumont must have thought: “Right. Let’s do a story about a hot-rod
racer.”
He
might have written it to order, for Practical
RoadHog or Automotive Assh*le Monthly
or whatever, but it’s engaging enough. For me, the story was less
intoxicating than the now-fanciful idea that people could write about anything,
in any genre, and sell it someplace where
it’s welcome.
“Traumerei”
sees a slight return to the world of dreams and their possible effect on the
physical world, and riffs on the notion that our entire universe might be contained
within a single atom in a hyper-universe. What if your whole existence was
simply someone else’s dream?
“Night
Ride” was another pitch black tale with no supernatural or fantastic element to
it, as a bunch of unpleasant men with dark secrets get together to form a jazz
supergroup. They’ve been looking for a piano player, and they find him, in a
young, naïve lad with incredible talent. The manipulative manager who puts the
band together is thrilled when they uncover this genius, someone so deeply entrenched
in the blues that he could make a holy picture weep. So when there’s a Yoko
Ono-style intrusion, the manager decides to take action. This one looked at the
dark ingredients which can go into the act of creating art, and the destruction
others can cause in the service of a muse.
We
close with the deliciously nasty “The New Sound”, where a man starts to collect
the sounds of nature after his vinyl music hoard starts to bore him. Once these
recordings start to include the sounds of death, a new addiction begins.
This
one was far more horrifying than most of the other stories in the book, and
hinted at what Beaumont might have created had the fates been kind to him.
There’s
a ghastly irony in the manner of Beaumont’s death, at the age of just 38, from
the then seldom-seen and barely-understood early-onset Alzheimer’s. For a man
who made a career out of plotting mysterious scenarios and uncanny endings, his
weird decline seems like an extremely unpleasant joke. What a shame.
An
afterword is provided by William Shatner, who starred in Roger Corman’s subversive
anti-racism movie The Intruder, which
was scripted by Beaumont from his own novel. Feted in its day, the film is now
regarded as a cult classic, and you can tell Shatner is proud to have been a
part of it.
Like
Bradbury, the Shat laments what might have been for Beaumont, a strange, doomed
young man who’s now sadly linked to a single time and place.
Art
is as close as we get to immortality, and the fact that Penguin has put this
collection together for new generations to enjoy is worth celebrating. But aside
from all that, if you simply want to read some good old-fashioned late night
shockers, Charlie is your darling.
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