Oliver Onions

Widdershins (Dodo Press) Oliver Onions

George Oliver Onions, pronounced oh-NY-ons (1873-1961) was a significant English novelist who published over forty novels and story collections. Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator, before starting his career in writing. He married the writer Berta Ruck in 1909. Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, but continued to publish under the name Oliver Onions. Besides detective fiction, historical fiction and a science fiction novel, New Moon (1918), 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.