A Touch of the Creature

Dustjacket art by Phil Parks. Autograph page art by Charles Beaumont. Introduction by Richard Matheson. Preface by Christopher Beaumont.

A Touch of the Creature: Unpublished Stories by Charles Beaumont

You're holding in your hands A Touch of the Creature, the first new Charles Beaumont book since 1968. For followers of the phantasmagoric, even thirty years later, there's no escaping Beaumont.

Who? ... people say.

Think Twilight Zone favorites like "The Howling Man" or "Perchance to Dream." Beaumont wrote nearly two dozen of the best, and midwifed countless others.

Think of the horror films that made Roger Corman a class act; Beaumont co-scripted The Premature Burial, Masque of the Red Death and The Haunted Palace, as well as writing and acting his own adaptation of his justly famous novel, The Intruder.

Think Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, co-written for the screen (as Burn, Witch, Burn) by Beaumont and his equally talented pal, Richard Matheson.

Think Playboy, where Beaumont was doing for the written word what Lenny Bruce did for comedy.

Think "The Green Hand," the conclave of multi-media intellects, "science fantasists" and madmen of which Beaumont was the chairman and prime mover.

Think modern fantasy at its best, and if the names Collier, Kersh, Dahl or Serling mean anything to you, then you'll know Beaumont, too. Or you can get to know him, right here, right now.

Ray Bradbury once aptly called Beaumont a "pomegranate writer, bursting with seed" – far rarer and wilder than one-idea types. Charles Beaumont died in 1968, concluding too soon a 13-year professional career that produced ten books, now all out of print.

In the 1980s, two resurrectional volumes of stories appeared. Those books incorporated a total of seven previously uncollected Beaumont stories. Seven new stories in nearly three decades, seven out of hundreds... and people ask, "Who?"

A Touch of the Creature will show you who, exactly, in thirteen new Beaumont tales – never before published, never before collected, with loving testimonials from his number one son, Chris, and his number one cohort, Richard Matheson.

And at last you'll realize... there's no escaping Beaumont.