Oliver Onions
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Oliver Onions
Oliver Onions (pseudonym of George Oliver) (1873 - 1961) was a significant English novelist.
Onions wrote a collection of ghost stories under the title Widdershins. While the book is largely forgotten and out of print, the story The Beckoning Fair One is widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case.
External links
- Template:Gutenberg author
- The Beckoning Fair One - text available online as part of Nina Auerbach's course reading (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~nauerbac/onions.html)