Countdown to Hallowe’en 2020 – Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont

Today’s Countdown to Hallowe’en is a review of a story collection from an underrated author better known for his screenwriting. 

—————————————

“I knew how powerful the mind was, then. … I know that ghosts and demons did exist, they did, if you only thought about them long enough and hard enough.”

— from “Perchance to Dream”

For s.f. and fantasy fans who know of him, Charles Beaumont may be best remembered as one of the three major script writers for the original Twilight Zone (associated with twenty-two episodes). But before TZ he was an active short story writer whose work appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, If, Playboy, Rogue, and Amazing, among other digests and slick magazines of the 1950’s. He was also a novelist (The Intruder), and a screenwriter, notably for the spectacularly goofy ‘50s s.f. movie, Queen of Outer Space, and also for the more respected Burn, Witch, Burn (based on Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife), 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, as well as The Intruder, based on his novel and featuring a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, who provided an afterward to this volume; an introduction was provided by Ray Bradbury, one of Beaumont’s close friends.

With his backlist only sporadically back in print since the 1980s, this Penguin Classics volume helps to bridge the gap between the early enthusiasts for his work and current readers. Beaumont died at the age of thirty-nine, and Perchance to Dream shows his growth as a writer in a relatively short time and suggests how much more he might have offered in short form had he lived longer. Which is to say, this is a somewhat uneven collection since it includes some early work that’s clever but not deep, as well as later well-crafted and thoughtful work.

Like his long-time friend and fellow TZ script writer, Richard Matheson, some of Beaumont’s scripts were based on his earlier short stories, and seven of those are in this collection, including the title story which comes first. A man barges into a psychotherapist’s office and demands help. He can’t sleep because he’s certain he will die. The reader is left to wonder if the man is merely working himself up or if he has had a premonition of his death. Even in written form, it reads as a Twilight Zone story.

The second story, also adapted for TZ, “The Jungle,” is considerably different, working a fine line between s.f. and something more like fantasy. And Beaumont’s prose is richer here, indicating his stylistic range as he conjures his scene in a manner that might remind a reader of Ray Bradbury and maybe even Clark Ashton Smith, yet still brisk and efficient. This story has another distinction in that Beaumont’s treatment of Africans was unusually respectful for the time.

Among the other adapted stories are “Traumerei,” “In His Image,” “Song for a Lady,” “The Beautiful People” and “The Howling Man” which is his most famous story, as well as one of the best remembered episodes of Twilight Zone. A traveler through Europe shortly before World War II becomes ill in a small village and is taken to the Abbey of St. Wulfran to recover. His recovery is slow and throughout it from the cell assigned him he hears someone in the monastery howling. Night after night he hears it and Brother Christophorus who tends to him denies the howling as does the Abbott. Finding the source of the howling, the man intervenes and then wonders what he has done, fearful of the consequences.

Coming in the wake of WWII,“The Howling Man” must have had a powerful impact on readers considering at the time there was almost continuously mounting evidence of the great evil of Nazism. The story still resonates as does the TZ adaptation.

Not all of the stories are fantasy or horror. Among those are “Song for a Lady,” “Night Ride,” “A Death in the Country” (with a Hemingway-like theme and setting) and “The Music of the Yellow Brass.” These range from a bit sentimental (“Song for a Lady”) to excellent (“A Death…” and “…Yellow Brass”); each circles around death, its causes and its meanings, and the issues of dignity and of achievement.

Besides “The Jungle,” “Last Rites” is a curiously touching science fiction story. Closer to horror, like the first two stories mentioned above and “The Howling Man,” are “Fritzchen” which examines parenting, “In His Image” which looks into identity and reinvention, “Free Dirt,” “The New Sound,” and “The Monster Show” which takes a jaundiced view of mass entertainment.

In his introduction, Bradbury mentions their mutual admiration for John Collier (Fancies & Goodnights). Some of the stories – “Sorceror’s Moon” and “Fritzchen” for example – seem close in spirit to Collier’s work. Stories leaning more towards fantasy have more of a Bradbury-ian flavor, like “Place of Meeting” where the survivors of an apocalypse come together, and “The Magic Man” which interrogates the need for fantasy, it’s premise of a magician coming to a small town perhaps echoing Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao and perhaps influencing Bradbury’s later novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes; even Beaumont’s prose seems more Bradbury-like than in other stories here.

Bradbury also tells how Beaumont, a teenager, and Bradbury, in his twenties, bonded over their mutual love of comics. As the eldest, one would expect Bradbury to be the central member of the group of California based writers which included Matheson, William Nolan and Charles Clayton Johnson. But they were gathered together and seemed held together and invigorated by Beaumont, who as a young man radiated plot ideas. Probably 20/20 hindsight, but his introduction made me think Beaumont was rushing to accomplish a lot in a short time, and the instances in this collection of his contemplation of death certainly do not cancel that impression. What’s impressive is that Beaumont’s craft progressed so quickly over his brief writing career that he left more than one volume of worthy fiction.

An earlier volume from TOR, The Howling Man, may be a better overall collection, its contents supplemented by comments and reminiscences from those who knew and cherished Beaumont. But it is harder to find now and for some time to come this may stand as the representative volume of Beaumont’s work. While a few of the stories fall flat for me – “You Can’t Have Them All” and “Father, Dear Father” for instance – I’d urge anyone interested in the development of fantasy over the second half of the 20^th century, and anyone interested in well-written, involving short stories, to try this collection.

PERCHANCE TO DREAM by Charles Beaumont

Penguin Classics, 2015

304 pages

ISBN: 978-0143107651

Review by Randy Money

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on LinkedIn