Ghost Stories - Oliver Onions (2003) 2nd Edition
OLIVER ONIONS has long been acknowledged by aficionados of supernatural writing as an elegant and accomplished practitioner; the eerie and beautifully-crafted ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ is perhaps the best known and certainly the most anthologised of his stories. Onions’ early collections of supernatural tales, especially the first and perhaps best, Widdershins (1911), but also Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929) are very hard to find.
This is more than a pity because, at his best, Onions surely rates as one of the most poetic and original writers of the strange tale. One of his great strengths, but perhaps also one of the reasons why the majority of his ghost stories have been overlooked, is that they are not easy to categorise; their settings vary greatly, they have a broad frame of reference and the traditionally ‘supernatural’ content is sometimes minimal. Nor do similarities with other writers spring readily to mind, although it can be argued that there is a correspondence with other twentieth-century masters of the psychological ghost story, such as Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman.
OLIVER ONIONS has long been acknowledged by aficionados of supernatural writing as an elegant and accomplished practitioner; the eerie and beautifully-crafted ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ is perhaps the best known and certainly the most anthologised of his stories. Onions’ early collections of supernatural tales, especially the first and perhaps best, Widdershins (1911), but also Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929) are very hard to find.
This is more than a pity because, at his best, Onions surely rates as one of the most poetic and original writers of the strange tale. One of his great strengths, but perhaps also one of the reasons why the majority of his ghost stories have been overlooked, is that they are not easy to categorise; their settings vary greatly, they have a broad frame of reference and the traditionally ‘supernatural’ content is sometimes minimal. Nor do similarities with other writers spring readily to mind, although it can be argued that there is a correspondence with other twentieth-century masters of the psychological ghost story, such as Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman.
OLIVER ONIONS has long been acknowledged by aficionados of supernatural writing as an elegant and accomplished practitioner; the eerie and beautifully-crafted ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ is perhaps the best known and certainly the most anthologised of his stories. Onions’ early collections of supernatural tales, especially the first and perhaps best, Widdershins (1911), but also Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929) are very hard to find.
This is more than a pity because, at his best, Onions surely rates as one of the most poetic and original writers of the strange tale. One of his great strengths, but perhaps also one of the reasons why the majority of his ghost stories have been overlooked, is that they are not easy to categorise; their settings vary greatly, they have a broad frame of reference and the traditionally ‘supernatural’ content is sometimes minimal. Nor do similarities with other writers spring readily to mind, although it can be argued that there is a correspondence with other twentieth-century masters of the psychological ghost story, such as Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman.