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"I Am Crying All Inside" by Clifford D. Simak Ten stories of mystery and imagination in a world that cannot be—including the never-before-published I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,. Learn more | See related books
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The phrase that immediately comes to mind to describe Beaumont is "a poor man's Ray Bradbury", but that's entirely too derogatory for this collection of tales. Beaumont's prose can't equal Bradbury's ecstatic, beautiful collections of metaphors and descriptions—it has a distinctly hard-boiled edge, as though his style was unable to escape the pulps to the same degree that Bradbury's did. However, his sense of twisted fun and near-endless ability to come up with damn good "What if?" ideas are equal to that of his more famous counterpart; in that regard many of these stories would be perfectly at home in The Illustrated Man or The October Country. And he does have Bradbury's gift for evoking nostalgia and emotion; to name but one example, the aching, awful sadness of "The Magic Man" is genuinely moving.
What a talent we lost when he died; who knows how many more wonderful little tales and Twilight Zone episodes he would have graced us with. While Ligotti is certainly more impressive in a literary sense, this was, no contest, my favorite Halloween read this October.
Also, this will undoubtedly be the only time you'll see a collection bookended by tributes from Ray Bradbury and William Shatner. An apt duo, though I'm unclear where the Bradbury foreword came from as he'd been dead for three years prior to the publication of this edition. I like to think he has indeed succeeded in his goal to live forever and has been in contact with Penguin Classics from the afterlife.
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Charles Beaumont is a five-star talent and hopefully this Penguin Classics retrospective of his work will go a long way to bring his fine work to a wider audience. Unfortunately, this collection, due to some questionable omissions, is only partially successful in encompassing the best of his work, and I can't imagine the goal would have been otherwise since the author's work hasn't been in print in nearly twenty years and is unlikely to remain in print hereafter.
The best part of this collection is that it includes seven stories that were later adapted for television on Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, almost all of which were adapted by Beaumont himself for the show. For those interested, these stories are: "The Howling Man," "The Jungle," "Perchance to Dream," "In His Image," "The Beautiful People" (filmed as "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" from a teleplay by John Tomerlin), "Song for a Lady" (filmed as "Passage on the Lady Anne"), and "Traumerei" (filmed as "Shadow Play").
This collection should also have included the stories, "The Devil, You Say?" and "Elegy," both of which were also adapted for the show by Beaumont, "The Devil, You Say?" as "Printer's Devil," for no other reason than to completely collect the Beaumont stories associated with the show. The collection also neglects one of Beaumont's finer stories that is also connected to Twilight Zone, "Gentlemen, Be Seated," which Beaumont also adapted into a teleplay and submitted to the Zone before, incredibly, it was rejected for production by the show's fifth season producer.Read more ›
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Charles Beaumont was really one hell of a gifted writer. This volume does a good job of showcasing some of his truly outstanding short stories. If you are a fan of Richard Matheson, you will love Beaumont. I can only hope that a companion volume is in the works.
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An excellent collection, reflective of this author's many talents, horror, science fiction, satire. Unfortunately, other Kindle collections of Beaumont out there tend to heavily overlap this one. For such a prolific writer, this seems unnecessary and a shame.
This collection has a lot of the stories I remember from an old Ballantine paperback called YONDER, and while I'm grateful to see them again, I wish that one of those weren't missing. Does anyone remember the name of this one? A bad-boy movie star shows up drunk at the premier of a dreadful space opera he just made, which is being broadcast with a new 3-D technology. Screwing around with the projector, the actor becomes projected into the movie somehow, and has to live through it as though it were real life, with all the ridiculous action scenes being genuinely life-threatening. And he can't back out of the danger; whenever he gets too far out of character, he blacks out and finds himself in a retake of the action. To a modern audience, it might seem like a mashup of GALAXY QUEST, GROUNDHOG DAY, and EDGE OF TOMORROW: LIVE, DIE, REPEAT. But the inventive and witty Beaumont came up with the idea independently back in 1958! (No, I really don't think any of those later movies plagiarize him, either, because it was just one of many great forgotten stories of the era. Proof being, I can't even remember its name. A little help, someone?)
Edit: see comments for the answer to this question.
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