The Howling Man

by Charles Beaumont, Roger Anker (Editor)

Remember that Twilight Zone episode? The one that gave you nightmares? Chances are it was written by Charles Beaumont. Beaumont's talents also helped bring to life such cinematic terrors as 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Masque of the Red Death'. As a writer of short stories, his contribution to the landscape of our nightmares is unequalled.

The Howling Man is the definitive collection of Beaumont's most haunting work. Here are the classics - "The Hunger," "Miss Gentilbelle," "Free Dirt," along with five never-before-published stories. The Howling Man features introductions by Robert Bloch, Dennis Etchison, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Roger Corman, Richard Matheson and many other masters of horror and dark fantasy. They offer illuminating tributes to Beaumont - as a friend, a colleague, and a man whose dark magic left an indelible stamp on modern horror fiction, and on their own imaginations.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Collections, Anthologies

572 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the 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

Reviews

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Beaumont, one of the main writers behind the success of the original Twilight Zone TV series, passed away at a young age due to early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. He left behind a wealth of short stories showing his wide range of interest and ability, not to mention a surprising maturity in theme and style for his tender age. This selection (published under the title "Selected Stories" as well as "The Howling Man") captures many, although not all, of his finest stories, including a few that were adapted to Twilight Zone episodes. As usual, the list of stories and ratings are below, along with some song lyrics that may be amusing or insightful or clever.

Miss Gentilbelle - 4/5 - I'm a boy, I'm a boy, but if I say I am I get it
The Vanishing American - 3/5 - now they can't see me any more
Place of Meeting - 3/5 - it was many years ago that I became what I am
The Devil, You Say? - 3/5 - what's puzzling you is the nature of my game
Free Dirt - 4/5 - get that dirt off your shoulder
Song for a Lady - 3/5 - lady, from the moment I saw you, standing whoaoa all alone
Last Rites - 3/5 - would it be the same, if I saw you in heaven?
The Howling Man - 5/5 - here come the man with the look in his eye
The Dark Music - 3/5 - darkness wakes and stirs imagination
The Magic Man - 4/5 - try, try, try to understand
Fair Lady - 3/5 - another one rides the bus
A Point of Honor - 3/5 - knowin' nothin' in life but to be legit
The Hunger - 2/5 - you think I'm a fool or maybe some kind of lunatic
Black Country - 3/5 - you feel alright when you hear the music ring
Gentlemen, Be Seated - 3/5 - and the forests will echo with laughter
The Jungle - 3/5 - it's gonna bring you down...huh
The New People - 5/5 - can this still be real or some crazy dream?
Perchance to Dream - 4/5 - we're off to never-never land
The Crooked Man - 4/5 - be yourself, no matter what they say
Blood Brother - 3/5 - and I still believe that I cannot be saved
A Death in the Country (The Deadly Will to Win) - 3/5 - at night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
The Music of the Yellow Brass - 3/5 - south of the border, down Mexico way
Night Ride - 3/5 - 'cause he knows that it's me they've been comin' to see
The Intruder (Chapter 10) - 3/5 - make everybody see in order to fight the powers that be
Mourning Song - 3/5 - we can be like they are, come on baby
To Hell with Claude - 3/5 - I found the simple life ain't so simple
Appointment with Eddie - 3/5 - my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite that's choking on the splinters
The Crime of Willie Washington - 4/5 - hangman is coming down from the gallows and I don't have very long
The Man with the Crooked Nose - 3/5 - half my life's in books' written pages
The Carnival - 2/5 - clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

[Eloy Cryptkeeper · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Howling Man/El hombre que aúlla- Charles Beaumont (1959)

"Los gritos, esa decimocuarta noche, continuaron hasta el amanecer. Fueron totalmente diferentes a cualquier sonido en mi experiencia. Imposible creer que un humano pudiera emitirlos y sostenerlos, sin embargo, no parecían ser animales. Escuché, allí en la penumbra, mis manos se apretaron en puños, y supe, de repente, que una de las dos cosas debía ser cierta. O alguien o algo estaba haciendo estos horribles sonidos, y el hermano Christophorus estaba mintiendo, o... me estaba volviendo loco"

*SPOILERS*
David Ellington, durante un viaje por Europa, se enferma y es rescatado por unos monjes, que lo llevan a su monasterio, donde lo hospedan y se encargan de su recuperación.
Cuando comienza a recomponerse, sera testigo de que todas las noches se oyen aullidos en el monasterio, y el interpreta que tienen un prisionero. Les plantea esta situación a los monjes y se lo niegan rotundamente, asegurando que no tienen ninguna persona encerrada y que es producto de sus delirios debido a la enfermedad. Hasta que luego de insistir y amenazar con traer a las autoridades, el Abad admite que tienen a alguien cautivo, pero que no mintieron cuando dijeron que no era una persona en cuestión. —Muy bien —dijo el Abad—. "Él es Satanás. También conocido como el Ángel Oscuro, Asmodeo, Belial, Ahriman, Diabolus, el Diablo".
Ellington,incrédulo y escéptico, actuá intentando hacer el bien
"Hijo mío, no te culpes. Tu debilidad era su palanca. La duda desbloqueó esa puerta"


Es un relato muy impactante. Es un poco raro en su concepción pero brillante .
Tiene algunos detalles interpretativos...
Cierta alegoría bíblica: como el mal necesita del bien y viceversa. La fe y la tentación.
y con un desenlace que tiene relación directa con la historia: Guerras, nazismo y Hitler en particular( haciendo alusión a que este era una de las versiones del anticristo). y al liberarse e su prisión en el monasterio cumplió con su cometido.

Fue adaptado para un capitulo de The Twilight Zone, por el propio Beaumont (1960)

[Kevin Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

People.

Regular, real people. Small people. Common people grappling with life. That's what makes Beaumont's work so striking. Yes, a matchless imagination. An ability to swing from quiet horror to science fiction to bizarre-what-genre-is-this to literary fiction. But at the root: people. A tired stock car driver living from track to track. Desperate and sad jazz musicians. I can't even begin to explain the magic that Beaumont weaves. Genre fiction truly lost someone early when he left us.

I wish I could give this 10 stars.

[Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

An very nice collection of Beaumont's short stories. A few seem a little dated, but most struck me as quite bold considering they were written in the 50's and 60's. All of them are remarkably original and diverse. In "Miss Gentilbelle", a deranged mother rivalling Mrs Bates not only kills her son's pets, but dresses him as a girl. "The Devil, You Say?" is a wonderful, light-hearted tale of a small-town newspaperman who makes a deal with a charming Satan. Hilarity ensues, when the news become reality rather than the other way around (the mayor and his wife become proud parents of a baby hippo). "Last Rites" with its touch of sci-fi evokes The Twilight Zone episodes Beaumont wrote, and the title story is a classic that still gives me the creeps. I loved the beautiful "Dark Music", where a prudish school teacher valiantly fights to protect innocents from the evils of sex education, until she is ravished by an ancient sex god. Atmospheric and deeply disturbing "The Hunger" features a young woman who willingly surrenders to a rapist and murderer. The affluent neighbourhood in "The New People" hides a bunch of murderous satanists who slip away from cocktail parties for a little orgy in the garage.

The stories are both chilling and playful, and very well-crafted. In one of the introductions, Frank M. Robinson wistfully remembers the time when short stories were a pillar of popular culture and people eagerly awaited the magazines to hit the newsstand. I can imagine the thrill of sitting down with your Playboy and tearing through the naked ladies to get to the next Beaumont story, I really can. Part of me would like to give this a five-star review, but as always with short story collections, there were a few stories that didn't grab me. Nevertheless, Beaumont deserves to be widely read.

[McKinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Beaumont was the father of modern horror, in my opinion. Sadly, he is beginning to fade from the awareness of even more discerning horror aficionados. This book is alarmingly difficult to get hold of, but my good friend and cousin-in-law Al lent it to me with the promise that it would keep me up all night, every night until I was finished reading it. How right he was. The stories contained in The Howling Man are not simply gratuitous and disturbing. That would be too easy. The subtle terrors of odd, off-kilter subtexts and delicately constructed plots married with the euphoric uplift of language well and beautifully handled make Beaumont's voice unique, in his own genre and any other. He wrote on certain classic psychological themes using tropes that he himself invented--but Beaumont was a master craftsman who defied and transcended genre or style. There was no one like him before and certainly no one like him since he died tragically at the age of 36, leaving us with an impressive catalogue of fiction and scripts (many of which he wrote for The Twilight Zone). Charles Beaumont has been practically out of print for many years, but a new, definitive edition of his collected stories entitled Mass For Mixed Voices: The Selected Short Fiction of Charles Beaumont was released on March 19th, so I hope that a whole new generation of psychological fiction lovers will find their way to the altar of the man to whom writers like Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and so many others owe so much.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic short story collection--I have been after this paperback for years and my boyfriend finally found it for my nook. As writer of some of the best loved Twilight Zone episodes, you know you are in for a treat when you read Charles Beaumont. You get a bit of horror, a bit of mystery, a bit of fantasy and a bit of sci-fi. A great eclectic mix--but despite the shining charm of the stories are the introductions to each story by famed writers and friends of Mr. Beaumont. I had not known much about his life, and was surprised to find out he had passed very young of Alzheimer's disease. A true shame especially reading the intros to the stories as each one of them had amazing things to say about Beaumont that touched on both his talent and his obvious charm as a human being. Especially touching is the piece by his son. Highly recommend this one.

[Dez Nemec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a HUGE Twilight Zone fan, I am familiar with Charles Beaumont. I had read some of his stories in an anthology here and there, but this is the first entire book of stories that I have read by him. I was blown away. There was never a time where I thought - this one sucks, time to move on. They were varied, but each was great. It saddens me immensely that he died so young, but he left behind some wonderful tales.

[Bryce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book of creepy and thought-provoking short stories originally at age 12... and gave myself the heebie-jeebies for weeks. I read them again as an adult and the quality of the stories and the scares definitely holds up. Beaumont is a master of his craft and deserves to be remembered for his prose writing ability, not just his work for television.

[Jeff French · Rating 4 out of 5]

This man knows how to write a story. Some of the stories are disturbing, Others are thought provoking, sad, scary etc. You never know what you are going to get with each one. A couple of the stories I didn't get. Probably went right over my head. Beaumont has a way with words, thats for sure. Some of these will stick with you long after you've done the book.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book has differnt stories of charles beaumont tales.charles is the winner of the bram stoker award he really has an extraordinary imagination . the howling man is the definitive collection of beaumonts most haunting work.

[Alexander Kot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a twilight zone fan this is admittedly biased. If you research him he became a character like his own stories. Underrated in my opinion but what's that? Scary, close to home, and really just honest. Give a couple a try.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first experience with the written work of Charles Beaumont, and what a revelation this is. This anthology from Tor is chock full of every story that made Beaumont the legend that he is, from the disturbing creep of "Ms. Gentibelle" to the spiritual horrors of "The Howling Man," and even showing a propensity for satire, as in the howler of a story "To Hell with Claude," and even straight drama, as in the excerpt from his only novel, "The Intruder". His stories are full of wit, excitement, fear, beautiful prose and excellently drawn characters. Nearly every story held me in a vise grip and once I got going, I couldn't stop reading. Beaumont was clearly a master, one we lost far too soon, but I'm elated that we have the remnants of his great legacy like this to take in. Absolutely recommended.

[William Mccamment · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of two books I read at least once a year (the other being Ray Bradbury's The October Country). If you are a short story fan you can't do much better than this book.

[Travis Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty packed anthology from Beaumont and my first experience with him (other than watching his Twilight Zone episodes). I think he was truly ahead of his time. Some stories were really good and will stick with me for a long time. However, with an anthology of this size they can't all be winners.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good stories but too much ambiguity for my simple brain, and many confusing metaphors.

Beaumont and Richard Matheson are like the Lennon and McCartney of short horror and for me Matheson’s stories are better.

[Lucinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

meh, some of the stories were okay but most felt kinda bland, and the rampant sexism was unpleasant.

[Robert Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent short stories and great story introduction's form some of the best writers of the time.  Looking forward to reading more of Mr. Beaumont.

[Konstantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

really good but i need to return to it when im in a more clearheaded state to give it my full attention

[Klowey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the title story.
Engaging, well-paced story with lively dialogue and a satisfying ending.

[David Merrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this quite a while ago, so I'm not going to give a direct review of each story. I'm also going to keep this short.

For those who don't remember Beaumont's name, he was one of the original Twilight Zone writers. The Howling Man (or The Collected Stories of Charles Beaumont, as it was known in hardcover) is probably the best single author short story collection I've ever read. This was a tribute book. Each story was selected and introduced by one of his friends, many of them writers. Many of them are also writers from the original Twilight Zone. If you're a fan of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, you absolutely need to own a copy of this book. An awesome collection by a great writer who died too young.

[Bmichael91 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best short story collections I have ever read. To keep it short: If you like The Twilight Zone, you will love The Howling Man. Not all of the stories are science fiction or mystery, but as I read through each story I kept thinking to myself "Man this would have been an awesome Twilight Zone episode".

Even if you don't like The Twilight Zone you should still check this out because these are amazing stories that were obviously given a great deal of editing and rewriting to ensure quality. "The Vanishing American" has earned a place near the top of my favorite short stories list, and Charles Beaumont joins the list of my favorite authors. I'm sad I didn't find out about him sooner.

[Papaphilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you recognized the names Richard Matheson and Rod Serling. I bet you do not know Charles Beaumont, which is a shame because he was worlds better than either of them and that says something because I am a huge fan of both. Time forgot Charles Beaumont and that is shame because this taste of his work is not enough. The book is named after the famous Twilight Zone episode he wrote. There is not a miss among the stories and many you will recognize. So sit back and enjoy a true master at his craft.

[PSXtreme · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent collection of stories. Even though they were written 50+ years ago, the stories still stay relevant. Loved some of them tremendously...others not so much. Nevertheless, overall I enjoyed the book enough to give it a 3 star rating. For fans of the original Twilight Zone, this is material that you'll love.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Former, original Twilight Zone, writer is twisted Bradbury, dark beneath placid surface. One unforgettable story has man invited to clandestine, illegal, party where people joke and laugh. Mirth is forbidden in grim future. Easily readable, provocative short story collection.

[Jared Sandman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great best-of collection for a man whose career was cut tragically short. Classic stories include "The Howling Man," "Perchance to Dream" and "Black Country." Interspersed with recollections from his friends and other writers who count him as an influence.

[Marty Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collection by a writer of immense talent. After reading some of the stories, I'd just sit there and wonder how he had pulled that off. Highly recommended.

[Tom Britz · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like The Twilight Zone, then you'll love this book. Charles Beaumont along with Richard Matheson wrote many of the best episodes.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like short stories of the "Twilight Zone" type genre, you'll love this book. An amazing author who was taken from us way too soon. Just an awesome book that I'll keep and treasure.

[Nixie Larue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has the greatest short stories in it. I just loved this book. Talented writer and amazing and creative stories!

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great forgotten writer of suspense stories. He left us way too early.