The Hunger and Other Stories Read online

  THE HUNGER

  and other stories

  CHARLES BEAUMONT

  with a new introduction by

  BERNICE M. MURPHY

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Hunger and Other Stories by Charles Beaumont

  First published New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1957

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1957 by Charles Beaumont, renewed 1985

  Introduction © 2013 by Bernice M. Murphy

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by Trent Roach

  INTRODUCTION

  Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) is one of the most important American horror writers of the 1950s, and yet his reputation has long been unfairly overshadowed by that of contemporaries such as Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Bloch. Part of the reason why he has often been neglected is because Beaumont died tragically young (at the age of 38) having contracted a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s that blighted the final years of his life. However, despite the relatively short duration of his writing career, he published dozens of short stories, two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957) and The Intruder (1959), and wrote numerous screenplays that were produced for television (many of them were adaptations of his own stories for The Twilight Zone). He was also a film screenwriter whose credits included Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), The Premature Burial (1962) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Had he lived, Beaumont would most likely have had as productive and high-profile a career as Richard Matheson, with whom his own professional trajectory had much in common.

  As it is, while Beaumont’s name is certainly held in high esteem by genre aficionados, his fiction has yet to receive the academic attention it richly deserves. It is to be hoped that this reprint of his first collection, The Hunger and Other Stories (1957) helps to remedy this state of affairs. As the stories contained in this volume demonstrate, Beaumont is often a more accomplished prose stylist than either Matheson or Bloch, capable of lyrical, impressionistic turns of phrase that inspire in the reader both melancholy and terror. Consider, for instance, this extract from the collection’s chilling title story:

  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: a soft unhappy kind of sound, rising and falling.

  Or the intriguing opening of his eerie paean to jazz, “Black Country”:

  Spoof Collins blew his brains out all right—right on out through the top of his head. But I don’t mean with a gun—I mean with a horn. Every night, slow and easy, eight to one. And that’s how he died. Climbing with that horn, climbing up high.

  Or this evocation of the obsessive joy felt by a little boy who is obsessed with train travel:

  “Listen, Neely! Listen, to the big sharp wind now, how it screams all around you! And see into the night, into the million fear-filled shadows, the cold and lifeless night. Feel the strong iron wheels bump and pound, carrying you through it all. And most important—he went to the railing and put his small hands around the metal—most important, Neely, let it come true. Let it come true!” (“The Train”)

  Yet as some of the tales contained in The Hunger and Other Stories amply illustrate, Beaumont was also capable of sketching scenes of nauseating horror, as in “Open House,” which begins as a henpecked husband (a butcher by trade) surveys the crime scene moments after he has murdered his wife:

  Mr. Pierce rose and looked at the bathtub. At the water that was not water any longer, but, instead, bright red ink, burning red against the glistening white porcelain sides. At the pale things floating in the bright red water, the pale soft things, floating, drifting, turning, like pieces of lamb in a simmering stew.

  It is typical of Beaumont that he should make it clear that Pierce has dismembered his wife, without directly saying so, and that his description of the bathtub captures the sense of shocked detachment being experienced by the murderer, who has transformed his victim into nothing more than meat to be disposed of (an extra element of disgust strikes the reader when we are told that Pierce plans to parcel out his wife to customers at his shop). Beaumont always knows exactly which information to provide to the reader, and what to withhold, in order to create maximum disquiet.

  This facility for quickly and carefully establishing deeply disturbing scenarios can also be seen in one of his best-known stories, “Miss Gentilbelle,” which, with its depiction of monstrous motherhood and gender confusion, anticipates Bloch’s Psycho by several years. As in several of the stories contained in this collection, the innocence of a vulnerable youngster (in this case a boy named Robert who is being raised as a girl by his insane mother) is corrupted by the adults around him. Miss Gentilbelle uses little Robert’s love of animals against him:

  The parakeet screamed for a considerable time before Miss Gentilbelle pressed the life from it. When it was silent, at last, the white fingers that clutched it were stained with a dark, thin fluid. Miss Gentilbelle put down the butcher knife, and took Robert’s hand.

  “Here is Margaret,” she said. “Take her. Yes. Now: Shall we mend Margaret?”

  Robert did not answer.

  “Shall we put her together again, glue back her pretty little wing?”

  “No, Mother. Nothing can be mended.”

  “Very good. Perhaps you will learn.” Miss Gentilbelle smiled. “Now take the bird and throw it in the stove.”

  A recurrent theme in these stories is that of the powerful hold that fantasy can have over the imagination of the disturbed, alienated, or lonely individual. In “Miss Gentilbelle,” the title character has become so detached from reality that she punishes her child for his very existence by making him act in every respect like her idealized version of a little girl. Ultimately, although the boy’s father attempts to save him from this nightmarish existence, help comes too late. After enduring one final act of cruelty, the boy gives in to the vivid and violent delusions that have been plaguing him, and kills his monstrous tormentor, in the process losing whatever remains of himself.

  Miss Maple, the deeply repressed protagonist of “The Dark Music,” believes that fantasy has no place in her life, and yet finds herself caught up in a lurid sexual relationship with a mythological creature that may or may not be real. Sexual and romantic frustration also finds an unlikely outlet in “Fair Lady,” in which an elderly spinster becomes completely besotted with a bus driver with whom she has only ever exchanged a few words. Unbeknownst to the unlikely object of her affections, Miss Elouise finds a deep fulfillment in their entirely one-sided “relationship”: “No wife in bed with her husband had ever known one tenth this intimacy; no youngsters in the country under August stars had ever come near to the romance that was hers; nor had ever a woman known such felicity, unspoken, so richly there.” Though the awareness that she is in fact deeply deluded flitters around the edges of her consciousness, she prefers the consolations of fantasy to the loneliness of a life lived without love.

  As Beaumont appears to suggest in “Fair Lady,” there are times therefore when fantasy can ultimately be a positive outlet for the lonely individual. This is certainly true in the charming story “The Vanishing American,” which is as evocative a portrait of alienated white collar
masculinity as anything found in Matheson or John Cheever. Mr. Minchell, a disenchanted middle-aged office clerk in a “cheap sharkskin suit” suddenly realizes that he is deeply unhappy. As his sense of personal crisis mounts, even the crowds on the street take on a deeply sinister aspect: “They all had furtive appearances, it seemed to him suddenly, even the children, as if each was fleeing from some hideous crime.”

  Minchell’s crisis manifests itself in a very literal way: he finds that no one—not his co-workers, not his wife and children, can see him—even the mirror refuses to reflect his image. Whereas in “Open House” this kind of alienation results in murder, here, a much more benign resolution is reached. Mr. Minchell happens upon a magnificent stone lion at the entrance to the public library and rediscovers the imaginative impulses and sense of playfulness he had reluctantly left behind in childhood. Upon sitting on the lion and being cheered on by an appreciative crowd, he suddenly “reappears”: “Mr. Minchell grinned. Somehow, he realized, in some mysterious way he had been given a second chance. And this time he knew what to do with it.”

  In stories such as “Fair Lady” and “The Vanishing American” the 1950s writer whom Beaumont most resembles is Shirley Jackson, whose work shares with his a recurrent fascination with the devastating effects of loneliness and the empowering and yet dangerous allure of fantasy. As in Jackson’s oeuvre, there is also a recurrent sense that his protagonists have drifted into acute unhappiness without realizing quite how this state of affairs came to be.

  One of the most characteristic preoccupations of 1950s horror fiction was the post-World War II awareness that the evils perpetrated by human beings themselves were much more terrifying than horrors perpetrated by any of the traditional bogeymen. The result was a trend towards more realistic, and psychologically based, horror fiction rooted in the mundane and the everyday. Though the supernatural is certainly alluded to in The Hunger and Other Stories (as in “Tears of the Madonna,” “The Black Country,” “Free Dirt,” and “The Dark Music”) overt supernaturalism doesn’t really feature all that often. The terror here most often comes from the wrongs perpetrated by individuals who believe that their own grievances and twisted mindsets given them the right to inflict pain and suffering upon others, as in “Miss Gentilbelle,” “Open House,” “A Point of Honor,” and “Nursery Rhyme.”

  A nice twist on this premise comes in “The Murderers,” which, like many of Beaumont’s tales, opens with a memorable line: “The pale young man in the bright red vest leaned back, sucked reflectively at a Russian candy pellet—the kind with real Jamaican rum inside—and said, yawning, ‘Let’s kill somebody tonight.’” In “The Murderers,” a Leopold-and-Loeb style duo of young men decide to prove their superiority, inviting a homeless man, “Mr. Fogarty,” to their apartment and killing him. However, their victim proves more much canny than they have anticipated, and they wake up the next day to find that he has robbed the apartment of all of its priceless paintings, as well as “Mother’s silver.”

  “Free Dirt” and “The Infernal Bouillabaisse” also feature protagonists whose self-absorption rebounds upon them in a fiendishly ironic fashion. “Free Dirt” is an effective and grimly humorous Suburban Gothic tale in which the “heroically miserly” and greedy protagonist “Mr. Aorta” (names often suggest much in Beaumont) decides to fertilize his vegetable garden with dirt stolen from the local cemetery. In a dénouement that evokes the morbid wit of E.C. horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt, the glutton is found dead at the dinner table, his stomach packed with “many pounds of dirt.”

  The protagonist of the “The Infernal Bouillabaisse,” a member of an exclusive gourmet dining club, becomes so fixated upon discovering the secret recipe behind the delicious dish mentioned in the title that he murders the rival who refuses to give it to him. The pretension and self-absorption of both men is perfectly anticipated by the story’s opening lines: “I like to think of our stomachs,” Mr. Frenchaboy said, in conclusion, “as small but select museums, to which a new treasure should be added at least once a day.”

  The relationship between what society deems “normal” and what is considered “abnormal” is another common theme of 1950s horror fiction and is an obvious response to what was often perceived to be the restrictive conformity and intense focus upon conventional domesticity that characterized the post-war era. Beaumont’s fiction often draws upon the violent ruptures that occur when these pressures become too much to cope with. Marriage and family life do not bring happiness for any of the men depicted in the stories featured here: instead, as is vividly evoked in “Open House” and “The Vanishing American,” the transformation into husband and father necessitates letting go of the dreams and fancies of youth.

  His most striking critique of the decade’s culture of conformity comes in “The Crooked Man,” which is set in a dystopian society in which homosexuality has become compulsory, and heterosexuality is strictly prohibited. The story exhibits a characteristic sympathy for society’s outsiders (the male protagonist, who has fallen in love with a woman, tries to persuade her that, “We’re not the unnatural ones, no matter what they say”), but by the end of the story, the forces of repressive authority have triumphed, and the story’s “deviant” hero has been arrested and carted off for “treatment.” “It’ll make a new man of you,” one of the leering police officers smugly predicts. Whilst the rather simple inversion of existing societal taboo could perhaps be seen today as a little pat, the story is nevertheless a daring and ambitious one, and like his melancholy tale “Last Night the Rain” (another story of misfits who briefly find solace in each other’s company) further illustrates Beaumont’s strong interest in those who have, either by dint of their sexuality, their sensitivity, or their insanity, been excluded from “mainstream” society.

  Those reading this collection may also notice, however, that Beaumont’s stories often display a problematic attitude towards female sexuality and physicality. During “Open House,” we are told that the henpecked murderer Mr. Pierce married a pretty Southern Belle, but ended up bound for life to “a fat, candy-eating, movie-magazine-reading dirty-bathrobe-wearing wife with a million nauseating habits.” Mr. Minchell’s unhappiness in “The Vanishing American” similarly has much to do with a controlling wife who is notable for her “vicious, unending complaints.”

  Beaumont’s often negative depiction of female characters can most notably be found in the four stories here about repressed, sexually frustrated, and deluded spinsters—“Miss Gentilbelle,” “Fair Lady,” “The Dark Music,” and “The Hunger.” “Fair Lady” admittedly presents its protagonist as a fairly benign (if obsessive) character, but whilst the wives here are nagging harridans, unmarried women are, at best, to be pitied, and, at worst, are depicted as actively horrific, as in “Miss Gentilbelle.” In both “The Hunger” and “Dark Music,” for instance, repressed sexual urges drive frustrated women in their late thirties to engage in dangerous and self-destructive behavior.

  Miss Maple, the protagonist of “The Dark Music,” is a 37-year-old teacher of biology so repulsed by the thought of anything to do with reproduction or sexuality that she even refuses to teach classes in Sex Education. She also engages in blackmail in order to safeguard her position. Miss Maple regards sexual knowledge as an affront to “goodness” and “innocence” and sees herself as a heroic defender of “traditional” values. As she gazes upon a patch of the countryside that appears never to have been sullied by a human presence, we are told that she views herself in similar terms: “She believed in purity, and had her own definition of the word.” Nevertheless, as her name suggests, Miss Maple cannot deny nature forever: “. . . she fought her body and her face every morning, but she was not victorious. In spite of it all, and to her eternal dismay, she was still an attractive woman.”

  After being seduced by the sound of pan pipes, Miss Maple is irresistibly drawn to a secluded glade where she engages in sexual activity with a goat-like man-beast that is most likely Pan hi
mself. Despite the fact that she finds herself returning to the forest, night after night, she still hypocritically upholds the rigidly conservative and damaging “moral” viewpoints that had characterized her behavior up to that point. She has, we are told, “developed the facility of detachment to a fine degree.” By the end of the story, however, she will pay a high price indeed for her hypocrisy.

  The title story in the collection, “The Hunger,” has a much more sympathetic protagonist, but again, we have here an unmarried woman whose state is actively equated with loneliness and sexual repression. Julia Landon, 38 years old, lives with her two older sisters (also unmarried) in a small town which is gripped by fear because a murderer is targeting local women. Julia, who is profoundly lonely, and feels that all chance of romantic and sexual fulfillment has passed her by already, becomes increasingly fixated upon the murderer, to the extent that her obsessive fixation increasingly comes to resemble his own violent impulses. She empathizes with what she perceives to be his need for human contact: “You want love so badly you must kill for it.” Eventually, in a plot development that anticipates the premise of Muriel Spark’s equally chilling 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat, Julia actively seeks out the killer: “I’ve been looking for you. Every night, I’ve thought of you.” (Protagonists who actively seek our death also feature in “The Customers,” which evokes Ray Bradbury at his finest).

  Beaumont’s female characters are therefore seen as even more restricted by society and circumstance (as well as by individual circumstances) as the men in his stories. The fact that his unmarried women are all, to a lesser or greater extent, deluded fantasists, suggests that they have been gravely affected by their exclusion from the sphere of the nuclear family, and that Beaumont himself may have internalized his era’s belief that such women will never find true fulfillment or happiness. Miss Gentilbelle is, in her own way, merely an even more disturbed version of Miss Maple: a twisted psychotic who is the epitome of the suffocating mother figure contemporary commentators such as Philip Wylie, author of A Generation of Vipers (1942), identified as a threat to the future of the very nation itself.