Charles Beaumont Born Today 1929

Born today in the barely conceivable year of 1929, Charles Beaumont is one of the forgotten figures in horror/science fiction/fantasy. Well, not at Too Much Horror Fiction! I originally featured Beaumont here. You can also watch his many episodes of "The Twilight Zone" on Netflix Instant. You ever find one of his vintage paperbacks in a used bookstore, buy it. I've got a few, but not these (Yonder, a collection from 1958, is especially desired):

1982 collection

Novel 1959 (Corman adapted the '62 movie, a Shatner film before "Star Trek")

1961. Grantland was a Beaumont pseudonym

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary (1974) and a Personal Update

Gorgeous, gorgeous, utterly gorgeous cover art (artist unknown, alas - *update: it's actually George Ziel) for a novel I've only recently found out about, a sort of fantasy-horror about evil and mind-controlling plants. I love everything about it, and don't you? Gwen, in Green you can be sure has been added to my must-have list! Read a review here, which features the UK paperback.

Speaking of my must-have list: this past weekend I took a mini-vacation up to my hometown in South Jersey and was able to visit that used bookstore I worked at in the early '90s, now called Bogart's Books. Armed with that list, and with the memories of many vintage-era horror "classics" on the shelves, I went in Friday morning and... bought nearly 20 paperback horror novels!

I couldn't believe the stuff I found, couldn't even afford to buy everything I wanted. Some stuff I wanted but didn't buy because it was in poor shape - Skipp and Spector's The Cleanup, Strieber's The Hunger, Leiber's Night's Black Agents - but what I did pick up will keep this site in good stead for some time. There is Masterton and Garton and Wright and Etchison and Hodge and Rice and more, much more. Hell, I even snagged a copy of John McCarty's essential and completely thorough Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, from 1984 (cover image from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll).

Also, my girlfriend is on her own little vacation and stopped in at the famous Powell's City of Books in Portland, OR, and called to say she'd found a few gems for me, some Grant, Matheson, and F. Paul Wilson, as I recall. Lucky me!

And on a personal note, I probably haven't mentioned it here but I've been laid off so far this entire year... till this week. Now that I'm back to full-time work I'm not sure if I'll be updating Too Much Horror Fiction as often as I have been. But I always make time to read - in fact, I don't even have to make time to read; I just read, and always have - and now I've got more than a dozen novels added to my shelves and to-read list. Oh well, I wouldn't have it any other way!