Author:Charles Beaumont
That Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone is only natural: for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. So take one uneasy step and fall headlong into his world: a world where lions stalk the plains, classics cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five stories that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.
This volume contains an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by William Shatner, two fellow science fiction luminaries who counted themselves among Beaumont's close friends.
Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre
—— Dean KoontzThe name of Charles Beaumont will be honored and recognized for generations yet to come
—— Robert BlochMasterful ... mesmerising ... Like Nabokov, Marra is a writer for whom essential truths are found in detail... The nine interlocking stories grip from the off with their dry tone and meticulously realised worlds of totalitarian life and its aftermath
—— Sarah Gilmartin , Irish TimesGripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too
—— John Sunyer , Financial TimesMarra creates an unnerving story of a world, then and now, dominated by untouchable authorities that operate at every social level... a writer of intelligence, wit and sensitivity, adept at telling stories that entertain but also create the sensation that they are not so strange as fiction
—— George Berridge , Times Literary SupplementA work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining
—— Liam Hess , Literary ReviewMarra’s sharp prose is alternatively ironic and poetic, giving a sympathetic voice to the most dispossessed characters…A memorable book on memory and how we try to remember’
—— Stephen Coulson , LadyA very Russian nostalgia and sense of narrative resonate in this story of memories and how we remember, that runs from Stalin's purges to modern war-ravaged Chechnya. The lives of sympathetically voiced criminals, mercenaries, lovers and artists are interwoven in precisely crafted plotlines
—— Lady, Book of the YearAddictive
—— Michelle Dean , GuardianA superbly artful collection
—— BBC CultureRemarkable... Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased
—— Washington PostAudacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless
—— New York Times Book ReviewEach story is a gem… almost unbearably moving
—— New York TimesSeamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour
—— International New York TimesMarra’s Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony... the book’s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution... A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil
—— Kirkus