Charles Beaumont’s untimely death in 1967 at age 38 cut short the brief but brilliant career of a writer now regarded as a master of modern weird fiction. The author of three extraordinary collections of short stories, the acclaimed novel The Intruder, and scripts for cult classic horror films and the popular TV series The Twilight Zone, Beaumont was at work on a fourth collection at the end of his life. The contents of that book, which he hoped to title A Touch of the Creature, remained unpublished until a limited hardcover edition in 2000, now long out-of-print. Ranging in tone from the eerie and unsettling “The Indian Piper” and “Time and Again” to the offbeat and humorous “Adam’s Off Ox” and “The Junemoon Spoon”, these stories reveal previously unknown sides to this talented writer and will not disappoint any fan of Beaumont’s work. This edition includes all fourteen tales from the limited hardcover edition, along with three additional never-before-seen stories, and features a new introduction by award-winning editor Roger Anker.
Author
Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago in 1929. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and worked at a number of jobs before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. His story “Black Country” (1954) was the first work of short fiction to appear in Playboy, and his classic tale “The Crooked Man” appeared in the same magazine the following year. Beaumont published numerous other short stories in the 1950s, both in mainstream periodicals like Playboy and Esquire and in science fiction and fantasy magazines. His first story collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, was published in 1957 to immediate acclaim, and was followed by two further collections, Yonder (1958) and Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960). He also published two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957, pseudonymously, with John E. Tomerlin), and The Intruder (1959). Beaumont is perhaps best remembered for his work in television, particularly his screenplays for The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote several of the most famous episodes. His other screenwriting credits include the scripts for films such as The Premature Burial (1962), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). When Beaumont was 34, he began to suffer from ill health and developed a baffling and still unexplained condition that caused him to age at a greatly increased rate, such that at the time of his death at age 38 in 1967, he had the physical appearance of a 95-year-old man. Beaumont was survived by his wife Helen, two daughters, and two sons, one of whom, Christopher, is also a writer. Beaumont’s work was much respected by his colleagues, and he counted Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Roger Corman among his friends and admirers. -Valancourt Books
