Perchance to Dream - Charles Beaumont

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories by Charles Beaumont / ISBN 9780143107651 / 336-page paperback from Penguin (with a cover illustration by Will Sweeney!)

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The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer.

It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone—for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont’s finest stories, including seven that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.

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, as Perchance to Dream amply shows, was more than most writers enjoy in the longest of lifetimes." -NPR

Charles Beaumont (1929–1967) was the author of three collections of short stories and two novels. He penned twenty-two episodes of The Twilight Zone, considered some of the show’s finest.