Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

Description

Perchance to Dreamcontains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories - including five that he later adapted forTwilight Zoneepisodes - with a foreword by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by William Shatner. With Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot arriving, read the stories that inspired some of the show's greatest episodes, including "The Howling Man"! 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 forThe Twilight Zone-for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dreamcontains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including seven that he later adapted forTwilight Zoneepisodes. 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. " Beaumont's imagination, asPerchance to Dreamamply shows, was more than most writers enjoy in the longest of lifetimes."-NPR For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.

Charles Beaumont (b. Charles Nutt) was born in Chicago in 1929. He led a strange, isolated childhood, leading him to develop an adventurous imagination. In tenth grade, he dropped out of high school to join the army, and later moved to Los Angeles to seek a career as an actor, writer, or artist. In 1954, his story "Black Country" became the first story published in Playboy magazine. Over the course of the next ten years, he published two novels, three collections of short stories, and penned an estimated twenty-two episodes for The Twilight Zone. He died in 1967. Ray Bradbury had a career spanning more than seventy years. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. William Shatner has cultivated a career spanning over 50 years as an award-winning actor, director, producer, writer, recording artist, and horseman. He is one of Hollywood's most recognizable figures.

Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre -- Dean Koontz The name of Charles Beaumont will be honored and recognized for generations yet to come -- Robert Bloch