Aw, dudes, check this out!!!!

Collections of sinister, humorous, and just plain weird literary greatness.

I know, old books. You’re as excited as I am, right??? If not, please allow me to explain just a bit. In the photos above what you see are original publications of short story collections by one Charles Beaumont. Like Richard Matheson, Beaumont wrote for The Twilight Zone. Unlike Matheson, Beaumont was not able to live a long life, thereby enabling him to spread his literary awesomeness to a greater audience, or to garner movie deals from his stories which would go on to be remade three separate times.

Beaumont died tragically at the young age of thirty-eight, victim of an odd condition that has now been said to be Alzheimer’s, but at the time was unknown. Due to his untimely passing, his career was understandably short, yet the body of work which he left behind him has led authors such as Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz to remark that his influence is deep and wide even today.

Doing some hunting around on Wikipedia in recent weeks, I happened across Beaumont’s entry, and became enthralled. I noted that, while he hadn’t been on this earth long, he’d still managed to produce enough work for several published collections. Not being flush with cash, I checked the local library catalog. Zilch. I then realized that, while there were a few newer anthologies of his work, each one omitted stories here and there from his original publications. This would not do. I had to have them all!

Raiding the change jar (literally – I found I had fifty-two quarters sitting on my dresser in a pickle jar), I went to abebooks.com, recommended by a friend, and typed in his name. Oh, the joy when the search results pulled up numerous copies! I bought all three of his first anthologies. It’s been one week since I received them, and I’ve read every single one of them. They’re outstanding. Some of it is sci-fi, some horror, some are just plain humorous, but all are excellent.

I’ve started making notes for myself on the how and why of his writing. It’s very interesting stuff. For instance, out of 17 stories in his first book, only six of them have death directly incorporated. Out of those six, only four of those deaths are violent, and this from a book subtitled “A Collection of Violent Entertainments.” Here’s a guy who obviously pulls off the creepy and fearsome without resulting time and again to hack and slash violence. It’s not overdone or overwrought, it’s just plain good storytelling, and this, friends, is what it’s all about: telling a story well. If you can do that, then you don’t need to come up with some crazy new idea that no one has ever done before. Although, honestly, Beaumont pulled that off too. His short story “The Crooked Man” caused quite a stir when it came out in Playboy in 1955. No one had seen anything like it in mainstream press at that time. His idea to flip heterosexuality with homosexuality in a word where births were controlled in a lab, making hetero relationships illegal – powerful stuff in that day and age. Still a good story to this day.

I will continue going through these and making notes. He was an expert, a pro, and there’s certain to be much I can learn from him. If you’re at all curious, I suggest hunting down some of his work. For six or eight bucks including shipping, you can do far worse than indulging in Beaumont’s work.