“[Beaumont’s] imagination, as Perchance to Dream amply shows, was more than most writers enjoy in the longest of lifetimes.” -NPR
The Book Beat reading group selection for October is Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories by Charles Beaumont. The Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, October 25th at 7pm in the Goldfish Tea Room (117 W 4th St #101, Royal Oak, MI 48067). Reading Group selections are discounted 15% at Book Beat. For more information, please call (248) 968-1190. All are welcome!
Perchance to Dream is the profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer, with a foreword by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by William Shatner
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 seven 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.
“This fresh collection of Beaumont’s weird fiction is rife with fantastical tropes and twist endings…Twist endings get a bad rap in our oh-so-sophisticated millennium, but in Perchance to Dream, they’re in the hands of a master…Throughout the book, Beaumont challenges perception, norms, and our smug reliance on appearances, using supernatural and science-fictional elements to drive home his points — sometimes gently, sometimes jarringly…[Beaumont’s] imagination, as Perchance to Dream amply shows, was more than most writer’s enjoy in the longest of lifetimes.”
-NPR
“Beaumont’s stories offer flashes of true horror, subverting shock value with vertiginous questions about good, evil and human nature.”
—The Seattle Times
“Creepy, melancholy short stories from the mid-20th-century master…Each with its satisfying twist, often surprisingly surprising, these stories charm and entertain.”
–Kirkus
Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fictionsubgenres. 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.”