Blog-o-ween 2023: Charles Beaumont

My childhood nightmares were in black-and-white.

I am a child of the 1970s and 80s, so that means that I was raised with countless hours of syndicated reruns playing in the background. And those reruns were mainly in black-and-white. The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, The Munsters, The Addams Family...all these shows (and more!) played cheek by jowl with their more modern (and in color) brethren on every station up and down the dial. I didn’t differentiate between a show from 1960 and one from 1980. It was all the same to me. It was all entertaining.

But there was one show that hit a little differently. One show that wormed its way into my little kid’s brain in the bright light of the afternoon and hibernated there until the sun went down and it was time to go to bed...

Close, but I’m actually talking about...

The Twilight Zone, that bizarre brainchild of writer Rod Serling, was a touchstone of terror and wonder for many generations thanks to syndication. If you sang the four notes that make up the intro to its theme song in public right now, chances are very high a majority of the folks standing around you would know what it was from. They would also have to assume that something weird just went down, because why else would you be singing the theme to The Twilight Zone on a public sidewalk? Then, of course, they would have to give you a wide berth, because weird stuff is catching. After all...

Chances are also pretty high that, if people start thinking about The Twilight Zone, then today’s featured writer here on Blog-o-ween 2023 wrote whatever it is they are thinking of. I’m not talking about Rod Serling, however. I’m not even talking about Richard Matheson. Today, we are going to look at a couple of stories that came from the typewriter of the lost man of American fantasy, Charles Beaumont.

First up is the story that Twilight Zone fans know Beaumont for best. Before it hit American televisions in 1960, however, “The Howling Man” was published in the November 1959 issue of Rogue.

“The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth...In that time, before I had heard of St. Wulfran’s, of the wretch who clawed the stones of a locked cell, wailing in the midnight hours, or of the daft brothers and their mad Abbott, I had strong legs and a mind on its last search, and I preferred to be alone...”

“The Howling Man” is the story of a man who nearly succumbs to illness during a walking trip of Europe in the decade before the outbreak of the Second World War. Waking up in a monastery in Germany, the narrator finds himself under the care of a group of monks in the Abbey of St. Wulfran’s. While convalescing, the narrator hears screams emanating from somewhere deep in the abbey. When he asks his hosts about these screams, the monks claim that they hear nothing. With his strength returned, the narrator investigates and finds that the monks are keeping a man locked in a cell. The man begs our narrator to free him. The monks, the prisoner explains, are insane. Five years ago, they burst into his home, took him away from his family, flogged him, and then locked him away in that filthy room. The narrator feels pity, but the abbot, Father Jerome, insists that they have good reason for keeping the man locked away. What is the reason? Who is the howling man? And what could be the worst that would happen if the narrator did set him free? I mean...it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?

Next up is “The Hunger,” which was never an episode of The Twilight Zone. As dark and strange as those televised stories got, I don’t think this tale of madness, serial killers, and desire would ever have made it past CBS’s Standards and Practices Department. Instead, “The Hunger” was published in Playboy in 1955 and later included in Beaumont’s short story collection The Hunger and Other Stories in 1958.

“Now, with the sun almost gone, the sky looked wounded—as if a gigantic razor had been drawn across it, slicing deep. It bled richly. And the wind, which came down from High Mountain, cool as rain, sounded a little like children crying softly: a soft, unhappy kind of sound, rising and falling.

“Afraid, somehow, it seemed to Julia. Terribly afraid.”

There’s a madman on the loose in the town of Burlington, leaving behind a trail of murdered women. Julia lives at home with her two windowed sisters, Maud and Louise. The killer and his victims are all that Julia’s sisters can talk about. One would think they were obsessed by the crimes. Julia, too, thinks of the killer, of his reasons for doing what he does, and of the life he’s had, and how the loneliness they each feel can’t make them so different from one another. Instead of going to bed that night, Julia gets dressed and goes out for a walk. Just to feel the air, she tells herself, but deep down inside she knows the real reason she’s gone out in the middle of the night. What is Julia’s reason? And who is following her every step? And what will happen to Julia when the footsteps she hears come closer and closer and closer...

Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, Illinois, in 1929. He sold his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. Having been made fun of as a child because of his last name, he legally changed it to “Beaumont” for personal and professional reasons. In 1954, Playboy magazine published his short story “Black Country.” It was the first work of fiction to ever appear in the magazine, and soon thereafter men began to assure their wives that they only read Playboy for the stories. Around this time, Beaumont began to write for television and film.

In 1963, Beaumont was thirty-four years old and at the height of his powers as a writer. However, he soon began to complain of headaches and lapses of concentration. His speech became slurred, and his thinking erratic. His writing suffered, and the jobs dried up. His friends, including William F. Nolan and Jerry Sohl, did what they could, ghostwriting several scripts based on Beaumont’s ideas.

In the summer of 1964, after being subjected to numerous tests by the UCLA medical staff, it was determined that Beaumont was suffering from the effects of either Alzheimer's disease or Pick's disease, or both simultaneously. Whichever was the case, it was, in essence, a death sentence. Beaumont’s health declined rapidly until his death in 1967 at the age of thirty-eight. His son, Christopher, said Beaumont "looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch".

Both of our stories today are available in audiobook format. Just check your local library’s shelves or on-line catalog for the e-book. You can also find the episode of The Twilight Zone based on “The Howling Man” on Amazon’s free streaming service Freevee.

If you want to flex the muscles of your imagination, however, then listen to the episode of The Twilight Zone Radio Drama below. Actor Stacey Keach admirably takes over the master-of-ceremony reins from Rod Serling. The 176 episodes of the series were produced by BBC Radio 4 between 2002 and 2012. Many of the stories are ingeniously updated to reflect contemporary technology and trends.

Well, that’s all for today’s Blog-o-ween entry. I hope we haven’t frightened you too much. What’s that? You hear a man screaming? Do I hear it, too? Why, of course not. Don’t be silly. Just crawl into bed, close your eyes and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!