It’s somewhere in the mid-century, America, and you’re a little kid curled up under the blankets. It’s raining, your parents are asleep, and YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE UP, but you just can’t help it, see, cos there’s this BOOK. It’s full of all these weird stories, about monsters and aliens, sure, but also about stranger things: the mad man trapped in a remote monastery; an aging race car driver discovering just how determined he can be in order to win again; an obsessed scientist completing a time machine for no other purpose than for murdering his own father…And you keep on reading under the illumination of that big ol’ silver flashlight, and you’re CERTAIN the scratching at the window is just a tree in the wind…but what if it’s not? WHAT IF IT’S NOT?
So, Charles Beaumont was a busy genre writer working from the 50s into the 60s. He died young, but in that time made some notable contributions to fantasy and horror…notably in his frequent contributions to the original Twilight Zone (the scenario I described earlier, of the mad man in a monastery, might be familiar to Zone fans as the episode ‘The Howling Man’). Beloved by fans and fellow authors alike, this volume, PERCHANCE TO DREAM, collects some of his most popular stories.
Are they worth reading today? Well, mostly. Though his name is often spoken in the same company as Bradbury and Matheson, I do feel that if you’ve read THOSE authors, you needn’t quite go out of you way for Beaumont. What he did, he did well; they did it better. Ah, but who doesn’t desire just a bit extra of goofy, classic creepiness, eh? You? You desire more? Then roll into Beaumont town, and get ready for a wild ride.
Beaumont is a dedicated and highly efficient author, conjuring up entire worlds and characters in, sometimes, a handful of pages. His subjects can jump all over the place: on occasion he dispenses with fantasy entirely and focuses on studies of human beings, and the often cruel quirks that make up their lives. It’s in his fantasy stories that he really does shine, though. My favorite might be “Fritzchen”, which is a messy and unbalanced but somehow compelling tale of a selfish dad, a frustrated mom and a spoiled brat of a son…and the THING they discover writhing through the mud of the swamp. This is Fritzchen, and of course the son demands they take it home as a pet, and the mother is very put out and the father can’t see beyond all the money he’ll make when he sells the thing to the TV stations in the morning…and it’s only very slowly that the family comes to realize Fritzchen, for all his diminutive status, may have a few very nasty surprises for them…
It’s a story that swings wildly from surprise to surprise, and some work better than others. Its great strengths are its portrait of the American Nuclear Family as bitter radioactive fallout, and the cute manner in which the prose takes its time in revealing what Fritzchen LOOKS like not to mention what it can DO. It’s a wild, woolly and gigglingly vicious tale, and perfectly captures the ambience promised on this editions cover (seen above) which, holy crap, isn’t that amazing.
As for the rest of the book, most of the stories range from good to quite good, with a few falling flat. They are often, sadly, products of their time, especially in how Beaumont treats women. One tale, “You Can’t Have Them All”, in particular I can’t recommend, considering its winsome treatment of the protagonist’s efforts to bed lots of ladies with the use of a “love potion”, which is just what it sounds like, and its terrible. So, yeah, be aware of that. That is the worst example, though such tropes crops up enough to be like a fishbone stuck in the throat of the reader, spoiling what could otherwise be an enjoyable experience.
Still, acknowledging how problematic it can be, the collection has a lot of strong points. Not essential, and to be approached with some caution, these stories are frequently fine relics of a long-gone period where, as long as you were blinkered by bed sheets, the worst the world seemed to offer were the frightful words in a book of odd tales. Me like books.
Me Like Books 