[Gutenberg 39482] • Mushroom Town

Gahan Wilson ranked Oliver Onions as "one of the best, if not the best, ghost story writers working in the English language," declaring that "Mr. Onions did as much as anyone to move phantoms and other haunts from dark, Gothic dungeons to the very room in which you presently sit." Discussing ghost stories, Algernon Blackwood described The Beckoning Fair One as "the most horrible and beautiful ever written on those lines". J.B. Priestley described Widdershins as a "book of fine creepy stories". Robert Aickman named "The Beckoning Fair One" as "one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field".

Contents

In Accordance with the Evidence (1913)

The Debit Account (1913)

Mushroom Town (1914)

A Crooked Mile (1914)

Widdershins (1911)

The Story of Louie (1913)

The Tower of Oblivion (1921)

A Case in Camera (1921)

Gray youth (1913)

The Compleat Bachelor (1900)

Back o' the Moon and other stories (1906)

Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune by Berta Ruck (1915)

The Disturbing Charm by Berta Ruck (1919)

The Boy with Wings by Berta Ruck (1915)

The Tower of Oblivion-

An extravaganza based on the juvenating gland and its endless possibilities. The Boston Herald calls it "A novel of topsy-turviness in man's aging process, so original in its conception that it would be a pity to summarize it for you--written with distinction of manner as well as of matter."

Widdershins-

Contains the classic ghost story The Beckoning Fair One.

Onions wrote two detective novels: A Case in Camera and In Accordance with the Evidence. Science fiction novel is The Tower of Oblivion (1921), featuring a middle-aged man who recedes back to his youth.

Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, 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 realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case. Another theme, shared with others of Onions' stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation. Another noted story from Widdershins is "Rooum", about an engineer pursued by a mysterious entity.