Submitted for Your Approval: Rod Serling Ebooks

   If you think of Rod Serling, you think first of The Twilight Zone.  Chances are you think of Night Gallery next.  And if you're old enough, or if you're one of those who pays more attention to the writing credits than to directors, you may think too of the film adaptations of Seven Days in May and the original Planet of the Apes, and of Serling's earlier works for television such as Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight.

   You don't think books; Serling wrote television (and when he was at the top of his game, there were few writers in the medium who could equal him).

   But yes, he wrote some books as well.  Not many, but there were a few, and they're available again as ebooks.  With one exception, those books were collections of short stories he based on his television work.  Three of them were adaptations of some of his Twilight Zone episodes; two were adaptations of some of his scripts for Night Gallery.  The exception was a collection of three novellas called The Season to Be Wary.

   When I started buying paperback books, his collections of short stories adapted from Twilight Zone episodes were on the racks and I grabbed them immediately.  To my mind, the TZ books suffered a little from what might be called Novelization Syndrome, in which a story written for one medium is translated to another and loses some of its energy in the translation.  (If you've read playwright William Inge's first novel, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, you can see something similar operating there -- Inge's narrative sometimes reads more like stage direction and director's notes than prose fiction, as if he'd originally imagined the work as a play rather than a novel.)  Serling had already conceived these stories and told them properly as short films and it seemed to me that they lost something in the move to narrative prose.  But those books included adaptations of some of Serling's finest work for the series, among them "The Shelter," "Walking Distance," and "A Stop at Willoughby," and they retained enough of their impact to make the books well worth the time.

   Serling didn't walk away from short fiction after doing the TZ adaptations.  In 1967, he published a book of three novellas, The Season to Be Wary.  The novellas were not adapted from television scripts, but they had the energy and the feel, the themes and the twists, of Serling's best work for Twilight Zone (and two of the three were adapted a couple of years later for segments in the pilot film that launched Night Gallery); these novellas show a writer becoming as comfortable working in narrative prose as he was working in screenplays, and as Mark Olshaker notes in his introduction to the recent ebook edition they offer a tantalizing glimpse of the future Serling might have had as a novelist.

   Six Serling titles are currently available as ebooks; they are: Stories from the Twilight Zone; More Stories from the Twilight Zone; New Stories from the Twilight Zone; Night Gallery; Night Gallery 2; The Season to Be Wary.  You can find all of them in Amazon's Kindle store; if you're not a fan of ebooks, you can get the three TZ titles as trade paperbacks at this time and chances are trade paperbacks of The Season to Be Wary and the Night Gallery collections will soon be available too.

   If we're lucky, these volumes will be followed by ebooks gathering some of Serling's other work for television.  In the late 50s, a collection was published that included Patterns, Old MacDonald Had a Curve, The Rack, and Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Serling's comments on each -- it would be nice to see that one available again.  Ditto some of his other scripts, such as A Storm in Summer and Slow Fade to Black.  (And I for one would pop instantly for an ebook containing both the television and the feature film scripts of Requiem for a Heavyweight with any available notes from Serling.)  Contemporary audiences know Serling mostly through Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, but there's a lot of terrific work by Rod Serling that doesn't get as much air time these days as it should; here's hoping that we'll see some of those scripts restored to print as well.

Some Recent Short Story Releases

     Every so often, book discussion threads take up the popularity (or unpopularity) of short stories.  And there's no doubt that novels sell better, and take up far more space on the store racks.  There's no book store in the town where I live; the local racks are at Wal-Mart and one of the large grocery stores, and when I scan them I seldom find any books of short stories at all unless one of Stephen King's collections has been reissued.
     It wasn't always like this.  When I started buying paperbacks, there were plenty of collections to be found.  Among the writers whose short story collections graced the racks then were: Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Fredric Brown, Richard Matheson, Stanley Ellin, C. M. Kornbluth, Jerome Bixby, Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John O'Hara, Cornell Woolrich, Irwin Shaw, Richard Yates, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.  You couldn't move in the paperback aisle without tripping over anthologies edited by Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, or Damon Knight.  And that's not considering volumes from publishers like Signet Classics offering collections from classic writers like Poe, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Kipling, and others.  As I noted in an earlier post, this was the kind of selection to be found on the racks at one of the neighborhood pharmacies.  To find large selections of short stories these days, you'll have to hit a good-sized bookstore.
     But the advent of the ebook reader means that short stories are easier to find in ebook formats than they often are on most of your local racks.  Among recent ebook releases, you'll find: The Best of Joe Haldeman, which includes a wonderfully creepy Vietnam War horror story called "Graves," and this story alone is worth the price of admission; Jack Finney's About Time, which gathers most of the best stories from his two earlier collections -- several of these stories would have made fine episodes of the original Twilight Zone, and while a few of its selections like "The Third Level," 'I'm Scared," and "Of Missing Persons" may be familiar, there's a lovely lesser-known short fantasy here called "Where the Cluetts Are" which is one of Finney's best; The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories, Nightshade & Damnations, and The Best of Gerald Kersh, all by Gerald Kersh -- Kersh is having a nice revival at the moment, with Faber Finds and Valancourt bringing back several long unavailable novels and short story collections as print and ebook releases; E-Reads has published two collections of John Brunner's short stories, From This Day Forward and Out of My Mind -- the latter includes some of Brunner's best dark short works, such as "The Totally Rich," "The Last Lonely Man," and "The Nail in the Middle of the Hand;" Dennis Etchison's first collection of short horror stories, the award winning The Dark Country; John O'Hara's New York Stories; James Everington's new collection of weird stories, Falling Over; two more volumes of Robert Silverberg's collected short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City and We Are for the Dark.
     Novels may sell more copies, but there's a LOT of fine short fiction out there and it's easily available on any ebook reader.

Jack Finney Finally in the US Kindle Store

   If you're over a certain age, chances are you read Jack Finney when you were in high school.  If memory serves, his wonderful short science fiction story "Of Missing Persons" could be found in high school literature textbooks for some time -- I know that's where I first read it.  I don't know if that story is still being included, but if it isn't that's sad for a number of reasons, one of which is the thought of kids who maybe don't care to read all that much finding themselves caught up in a story that is perhaps the archetypal Twilight Zone episode.
   In his non-fiction book on horror from 1950-1980, Danse Macabre, King spends a few highly complimentary pages on Finney, pointing out the affinity between Jack Finney's fantasies and Serling's television classic.  And he's right -- if you want short stories that embody the feel of the Twilight Zone, I can't think of anyone better.  Some come awfully close, but Finney nails it.
   This isn't to say that Finney owes a thing to Serling.  Finney was there first.
   He was a writer with quite a range; his work included science fiction and fantasy classics like The Body Snatchers (better known by its movie title of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Time and Again, crime novels like Five Against the House and Assault on a Queen, and the marvelous short stories you'll find collected in About Time.  His work was often filmed and chances are you've run across adaptations before (Good Neighbor Sam, Maxie, four movies based on The Body Snatchers, and the two crime novels already mentioned), and some day Robert Redford may actually get a film version of Time and Again into production.
   In short work such as "Of Missing Persons," "I'm Scared," "The Third Level," "The Face in the Photo," "Where the Cluetts Are," and others, Finney sets his stage with perfectly ordinary surroundings and ordinary people and then introduces the fantastic in a matter-of-fact manner that makes everything that follows as convincing as a piece of solid reporting; it's an approach that you find in the best Twilight Zone episodes and in the work of other excellent fantasists like Richard Matheson.
   Most of his crime novels are out-of-print, but here in the US, Simon & Schuster has kept a number of his fantasy titles available.  The Body Snatchers, Time and Again and its sequel From Time to Time, Three by Finney (including Marion's Wall, The Night People, and The Woodrow Wilson Dime), and the selection of his short stories About Time have all been in print as trade paperbacks for years.
   In November all these will finally be issued as ebooks here in the US.  If you enjoy excellent fantasy, if you loved Twilight Zone, you'll want to grab these immediately if you haven't read them already.
   I've only two criticisms about the Finney ebook releases:  1) They've been too long in coming, and 2) Where Finney's short fiction is concerned, I wish S&S was doing what Gateway has done for the UK Kindle releases and issued The Third Level and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime; the stories in About Time are taken from those collections, and it would have been nice to see both of those released for Kindle here in the US as well as in the UK.  But Finney's work is finally coming to Kindle, and that's great news for any fan of sf and fantasy.

   And a reminder: this month will see the release in both ebook and paperback formats of two short story collections by Gerald Kersh.  Faber Finds will release The Horrible Dummy, and The Best of Gerald Kersh (Valancourt has already reissued the excellent Nightshade and Damnations in paperback with an ebook in the works but not yet available).

A Few Words about Elmore Leonard

   Many moons ago, Dean Koontz published a book called How to Write Best-Selling Fiction.  At the end of that book, Koontz included a chapter discussing writers any aspiring novelist was advised to study.  There were a lot of prominent names in that chapter, and some names that were not yet nearly as prominent as they became later; one of them was Elmore Leonard.
   At that time, Leonard was not yet a best-seller, but it was clear that he had all the makings.  In his comments on Leonard, Koontz said (if memory serves) that one day some smart publisher would lay a large stack of dollars on Leonard and ask him to deliver the ultimate novel about city street types, and Leonard would deliver because there was nobody better at that kind of book.
   I hadn't yet read Leonard then, and didn't know the name, but I recognized some of his western titles (Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, "3:10 to Yuma").  Not long after that, Avon Books gave a push to the paperback release of Leonard's City Primeval; I picked up a copy and read a few chapters.  A few chapters was enough to get hooked, and Leonard went on the buy-this-guy-on-sight list, and with good reason.
   There's a story, can't recall where I saw it, about Leonard's time as an advertising copywriter; he'd listen to customers -- in this case people who actually drove the pickup truck being advertised -- and a customer made a comment Leonard wanted to use in the ads, but they wouldn't let him: "You don't wear that sonofabitch out -- you get tired of looking at it and you go buy a new one."  Leonard had an ear for good dialogue right from the start, and he excelled at creating it.  Leonard's ear for dialogue is unsurpassed, and his people -- good guys and bad guys alike -- are so bloody interesting that you have to hang around to see what they do next.  In the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino there's a line that sums up quite a few of Elmore Leonard's characters: "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with?  That's me."  That's also a hefty number of Leonard's people, hero and villain, male and female alike.  And unlike so many fictional heroes and villains who seem to have more than a touch of comic book about them, Leonard's people -- from the leads down to the two-line walk-ons -- feel like the kind of people you'd find sitting on the next bar stool.  They feel like people you see every day on the street and you never really notice them unless you cross them somehow.  And Jeez, are they fun to watch.
   If you've not read his novels yet, chances are you've caught some of the films, among them Jackie Brown (from the novel Rum Punch), Get Shorty, Mr Majestyk, Out of Sight, and Hombre.  Good as those movies are, the books are better, fast and lean and often funny and scary at the same time, and never dull, and Leonard brought this off with amazing regularity over a career that spanned nearly 60 years.
   When John D. MacDonald's work began to appear in hardcover, there were several quotes that appeared regularly on the dust jackets.  One was from Gerald Walker, saying that MacDonald "knows everything dangerous that there is to know about people."  Another was from Kurt Vonngut, who said that "To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."  Both quotes could, I think, be fairly applied to the work of Elmore Leonard as well.
   RIP.

After Re-Reading Some Stories by Robert Silverberg...

   For a long time science fiction and fantasy lived in the short forms.  These days, novels get the press and the attention, but for quite a few years, sf & fantasy were creatures of the pulp magazines, and most of the prominent writers came out of the magazines.  Out of the short forms.  Many of the writers we regard as the giants in sf began their careers in the short fiction markets.  Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, C. M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Philip K. Dick....
   And Robert Silverberg.  After too much time away from his work, I had occasion to revisit some of the short work reissued by Subterranean Press and Open Road.  I hadn't read some of these in nearly twenty years -- they hold up wonderfully, and a number of the stories I revisited are even better than I remembered.
   Silverberg got his start in the 1950s, writing for the pulps, and by his own admission a lot of the earliest work wasn't particularly memorable; but with stories like "Warm Man" and "Road to Nightfall" and others, that began to change, and soon he was a writer to watch.  Silverberg was extraordinarily prolific, producing novels and short stories at an unbelievable pace -- that would mean nothing if the stories were simply forgettable hack work, but consider some of the novels and stories that he published in the 60s and 70s: Thorns, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Up the Line, Hawksbill Station, To Live Again, The Second Trip, The Book of Skulls, "To See the Invisible Man," "Flies," "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," "Passengers," The Masks of Time, A Time of Changes, Nightwings, "To the Dark Star," "Sundance," "Good News from the Vatican," "Born with the Dead," Tower of Glass, and so many more.  If you're familiar with the sf of the period, you know those titles.
   Silverberg produced some of the darkest gems in all of science fiction.  In "Passengers," the earth has been invaded by aliens; silent and invisible they float among us and for their amusement they ride their helpless human hosts, taking them over and controlling their actions until they weary of them and release them and move on to others.  In "Flies," Silverberg's entry in Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology Dangeorus Visions, an astronaut returns to earth; the victim of a fatal accident in space, he has been revived and reconstructed by aliens who send him back changed, a cold observer with an intense interest in pain.  The Book of Skulls presents four students seeking a cult in the desert southwest, a cult that may hold the secret to immortality -- but only groups of four may begin the path, and immortality is granted to only one; the other three will not survive.  Dying Inside gives us David Selig, whose only real connection to others is his ability to read minds, and his ability is quickly fading.
   Silverberg's output wasn't limited to fiction; he wrote non-fiction as well, including The Realm of Prester John, The Mound Builders, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, and If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem.  NonStop Press has recently published his book of essays Reflections and Refractions and the autobiographical Other Spaces, Other Times.
   For an example of Silverberg at the top of his form, check out the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas and read "Born with the Dead."  It's set in a world in which the dead can be restored to life to walk the world again, keeping to their own society of the revived and remaining aloof from the living; the protagonist has lost his wife -- she has been revived and he will not accept that she is no longer a part of his life, and he begins to intrude into the deads' society, a society that will not suffer intrusion.  "Born with the Dead" was the centerpiece of the special Robert Silverberg issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1974.  It's one of his strongest stories, and once you've read it, you'll want more.
   One nice thing about ebooks is that "more" is easy to come by.  Subterranean Press is in the process of issuing Silverberg's collected short fiction, both in print and in ebook, and the ebook editions of these volumes are very modestly priced.  Most of Silverberg's novels are available as ebooks as well.  Silverberg's body of work, spanning nearly six decades (his most recent book, Tales of Majipoor, was published in May), is one of the most impressive in modern science fiction.
   For a nice appreciation of Silverberg, check out Barry Malzberg's chapter on him in Breakfast in the Ruins (a book well worth the time of any aficionado of sf); in that chapter, Malzberg says that Silverberg's work was proof that you could " ...write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique....You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that."  Spot on.
   In speaking of Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish wrote that Sturgeon was the finest conscious artist that science fiction ever produced.  If there are other contenders for that title, Robert Silverberg is one of them.  If you haven't read him, pick up the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas, or the Subterranean Press volumes of his collected short fiction, or Dying Inside, or The Book of Skulls, or Downward to the Earth, and enjoy the fruits of one of the great careers in science fiction.

Ebook volumes so far of Silverberg's collected short stories

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=silverberg+subterranean+collected+stories&rh=n%3A154606011%2Ck%3Asilverberg+subterranean+collected+stories

Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas

http://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Byzantium-Six-Novellas-ebook/dp/B00CHW68SC

And in old business:

Earlier posts in this blog noted that Gerald Kersh reissues would be coming from Faber Finds.  Sergeant Nelson of the Guards is available for pre-order in Amazon's US Kindle store, and the short story collections The Best of Gerald Kersh and The Horrible Dummy & Other Stories were listed for pre-order just this morning (Aug 4).  Don't miss 'em.  And don't miss the Kersh titles from Valancourt Books -- Fowlers End, and Nightshade & Damnations.

A number of John D. MacDonald titles that weren't in the initial flood of non-TravisMcGee-series titles this past June will be released as ebooks in January; among them are Cape Fear (aka The Executioners), A Flash of Green, The Neon Jungle, Condominium, and The Last One Left.  There are still a number of MacDonald's books that haven't been ebooked, but at this rate it looks like there's a good chance that all of JDM's titles may be available as ebooks by the end of 2014.

And a brief commercial:  my new short story "Wasps" is in the Amazon Kindle store.  Find it at 

http://www.amazon.com/Wasps-ebook/dp/B00E458WNO

A Few Words in Praise of Richard Matheson

     The Twilight Zone was a television landmark -- five seasons of excellent fantasy, science fiction, and horror performed by almost uniformly excellent casts.  But what made TZ truly memorable was the writing.  If you refer to the writing on TZ, most people will think immediately of Rod Serling, the host of the series, writer of most of its episodes, and probably to this day the only writer immediately recognizable by most of the public.
     While Serling wrote a number of wonderful scripts for that show (including "A Stop at Willoughby," "Walking Distance," "The Shelter," and "On Thursday We Leave for Home"), he was one of three writers whose work made TZ the marvel that it was.
     The other two were Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson.  Beaumont died in 1967, struck down by something like a mutant form of Alzheimer's; at the time of his death at the age of 38, he looked like he was in his 90s.  The disease had affected his ability to work; Beaumont contributed a lot of excellent scripts to TZ, but the heavy lifting on a few of the last Beaumonts was done by his friend Jerry Sohl.
     Richard Matheson, last of the three, died last month at the age of 87, closing one of the great careers in American popular fiction.  His novels included The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend, Hell House, and Bid Time Return (better known as Somewhere in Time).  His work as a novelist was not limited to the horror and fantasy genres.  He wrote westerns (A Journal of the Gun Years, A Gun Fight), suspense novels (Hunted Past Reason, Ride the Nightmare), and a novel of World War II called The Beardless Warriors.
If he had written only The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend, and Bid Time Return, I think he'd have a permanent place in the memories of genre aficionados.  But Matheson was a master of the short story as well as a novelist.  Nobody who's read them forgets classic chillers like "Prey," "Born of Man and Woman," "Duel," "The Children of Noah," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," or "Button, Button," to name only a few.  His short fiction is usually kept in print along with his novels and excellent collections are available at this writing both in print and ebook formats.
     Matheson was also a superb screenwriter, often adapting his own work for film and television.  He was the screenwriter for the best of the Roger Corman adaptations of Poe in the early 60s, and with Charles Beaumont he adapted Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife for the excellent horror film Burn, Witch, Burn.  Adaptations by Matheson from his own novels included The Incredible Shrinking Man, Somewhere in Time, The Legend of Hell House, and The Last Man on Earth (the only film version of I Am Legend that bears any resemblance to the original novel).
     He adapted a number of his own short stories for television.  Best known, perhaps, are "Duel" for the Spielberg film, and "Prey" for the climactic segment of Trilogy of Terror.  But Matheson's work for television is most easily found in the original Twilight Zone, and his episodes provided many of that series' finest moments.  The two episodes starring William Shatner, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and the lesser-known "Nick of Time," were Matheson scripts.  So were "Steel," "Mute," "Little Girl Lost," "Late Night Call," the uncharacteristically light-hearted "A World of His Own," and others.  "Nick of Time," with its depiction of a man on the verge of letting his superstitious fascination with a diner's fortune-telling machine imprison him forever in a small Ohio town, is a perfect example of Matheson's ability to show nightmares lurking behind the surface of everyday surroundings.
     "Death Ship," for TZ's fourth season, is to my mind a real stand-out in Matheson's work for the series.  The original story, dealing with a spaceship crew who land on an alien world and find what appears to be their own crashed vessel and their own bodies dead inside it, is a nice science-fiction-horror story, well worth a read (and you can find it in his collection Duel and Other Stories).  But Matheson's translation of this story into a one-hour TZ episode is nothing short of marvelous.  Scenes in the script that were not in the original story expand and enrich the characters rather than simply padding the narrative for length, and the final confrontation between Lt. Mason and Capt. Ross has an intensity not found in the concluding paragraphs of the short story -- that the scene is performed by a pair of powerhouse actors like Ross Martin and Jack Klugman helps, but the strength of the material is all there in the writing.  The episode is a wonderful example of TZ at its best, it remains as gripping on repeat viewings as it was on the first, and it's one of the very few instances of a film adaptation equal to the original source material.
     So raise a glass to Richard Matheson, one of the best, and check out his books (http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Matheson/e/B000AQ285E), and some of his work for film and television (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0558577).  You won't be disappointed.  And if you've read or seen these before, take a little time to revisit them -- chances are you'll enjoy them as much as you did the first time, and maybe even more.

Gerald Kersh Again, John D. MacDonald Again, and Charles Beaumont

In February, I noted that this fall Faber Finds will be reissuing a number of Gerald Kersh's books; among the releases will be THE THOUSAND DEATHS OF MR SMALL, THE BEST OF GERALD KERSH, THE SONG OF THE FLEA, and others.  Since then, Valancourt Books has also reissued two of Kersh's books, his novel FOWLERS END (described by Anthony Burgess as one of the great comic novels of its century) and NIGHTSHADE AND DAMNATIONS (an excellent selection of Kersh's short stories edited and with an introduction by Harlan Ellison); even better, Valancourt will release new printings of Kersh's novel NIGHT AND THE CITY and the short story collection ON AN ODD NOTE.

John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series was released in ebook form earlier this year; last week, more than thirty of MacDonald's non-McGee books were released as ebooks.  Among the titles were his short story collection END OF THE TIGER, and the excellent suspense novels THE DAMNED, APRIL EVIL, and CRY HARD, CRY FAST.  Wonderful stuff.  And it looks like more MacDonald may be coming as ebooks.  There are no additional Kindle releases listed at Amazon yet, but in February there will be new trade paperbacks of SLAM THE BIG DOOR, A KEY TO THE SUITE, and the brilliant thriller CAPE FEAR; all three list as having an introduction by Dean Koontz, and the titles released last week all have Koontz introductions.  I'm guessing the rest of MacDonald's backlist is in the works, both as print and ebooks, and just not announced yet.

And finally: Charles Beaumont.  If you ever watched the original TWILIGHT ZONE, you know Beaumont's work.  "The Howling Man."  "The Jungle," with its protagonist stalked through the deserted late-night city streets by an African curse.  "Long Live Walter Jameson," the history professor with too much first-hand knowledge of his subject.  And more.  His books are too seldom reprinted (if memory serves the last time you could find a Beaumont collection on the mass-market paperback racks was in the mid-80s).  In late July, Valancourt Books (the above-mentioned publisher of several Gerald Kersh re-issues) will release a handsome trade paperback edition of Beaumont's first short story collection, THE HUNGER AND OTHER STORIES.  If you enjoyed TWILIGHT ZONE, if you enjoyed the work of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and William F. Nolan, you don't want to miss this collection.  It's a keeper, and its return to print after nearly 50 years is cause for celebration.

(Another note re: Beaumont.  You serious Beaumont collectors out there should be aware, if you aren't already, of the three hardcover titles available from Centipede Press -- RUN FROM THE HUNTER, THE INTRUDER, and MASS FOR MIXED VOICES: SELECTED SHORT FICTION.  Pricey, but for the collector well worth it; I've never seen a book from Centipede Press that wasn't beautifully done.  If you've got the $$$, you'll want these too.)