The Howling Man

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From Publishers Weekly In his brief career, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) turned out several score of stories in a variety of moods, styles and genres. Most of the 30 selections collected herefive never before publishedare introduced by one or another of Beaumont's friends and colleagues, including Ray Bradbury (Beaumont's writing teacher, whose influence is easily detected), Richard Matheson (who, like Beaumont, scripted many Twilight Zone episodes), Ray Russell, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and filmmaker Roger Corman. The stories are varied and wonderful; "Miss Gentilbelle," a woman who thinks men are beasts, is raising her son as a girl; "The Vanishing American" features a man who is saved from his meaningless life by an act of whimsy; "Free Dirt" is a cautionary little chiller about uncontrolled greed; and "Black Country" is an evocative, weird tale of life in the jazz world. Editor Anker has contributed an excellent biographical introduction. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Tragically short-lived, unjustly forgotten, yet remarkably talented, the literary voice of Charles Beaumont resonates from beyond the grave in this collection. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Beaumont's bewitching work appeared in Playboy, Esquire, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others, and he earned a reputation as a raconteur par excellence. He died prematurely in 1967 at the age of thirty-eight, a victim of Alzheimer's Disease, and his name faded into relative obscurity. in this long overdue tribute, editor Anker has gathered thirty Beaumont tales, including five previously unpublished. When Beaumont is at his best, as he is here, it's hard to imagine the stories being written any better. Take, for example "Miss Gentilbelle," an unsettling tale of a small boy whose mother's intense hatred of men drives her to dress and treat her son as a girl; "The Devil, You Say," a tongue-in-cheek relating of Satan getting his hooves wet in the newspaper business; "Free Dirt," in which the penny-pinching protagonist's greed leads him eagerly to cart off the soil of the title, but eventually gets him in over his head; "Me Howling Man," another tale involving the devil, this time detailing his release from a monastic prison by an unwitting accomplice and the havoc that eventually ensues; 'The Crooked Man," a thought-provoking futuristic tale of test-tube breeding gone awry and the resultant conversion to "heterophobia"; "Night Ride," a musing on the capacity of sadness to infuse musicians' work, and of the fine line between happiness and total despair that the player must walk in order to maintain that inspired level of performance. As Harlan Ellison states in his introduction to "The Howling Man," "No one-not critics or savants of semiotics or even readers of the most sensitive sort-can know how good Chuck Beaumont was at putting words on paper.... Chuck Beaumont was truly one in a million." That's not just hype, that's the truth. Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories comes very highly recommended. -- From Independent Publisher