George Oliver Onions (13 November 1873 – 9 April 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. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself. He married the writer Berta Ruck

Berta Ruck

Amy Roberta Ruck was a romantic novelist, writing almost eighty novels over the course of her writing career as well as large numbers of short stories....

 in 1909 and they had two sons, Arthur (born 1912) and William (born 1913). Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, but continued to publish under the name Oliver Onions.

Besides detective fiction

Detective Story

Detective Story is a film noir which tells the story of one day in the lives of the various people who populate a police detective squad. It features Kirk Douglas, Eleanor Parker, William Bendix, Cathy O'Donnell, Lee Grant, among others. The movie was adapted by Robert Wyler and Philip Yordan...

, historical fiction

Historical fiction

Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...

 and a science fiction novel, New Moon (1918), Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories

Ghost story

A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, or an account of an experience, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. Colloquially, the term can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has...

, 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

Horror fiction

Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...

, especially psychological horror

Psychological horror

Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that relies on character fears, guilt, beliefs, eerie sound effects, relevant music and emotional instability to build tension and further the plot...

. 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

Catatonia

Catatonia is a state of neurogenic motor immobility, and behavioral abnormality manifested by stupor. It was first described in 1874: Die Katatonie oder das Spannungsirresein ....

 and murder, told from the sufferer'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.

Onions was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...

 for his 1946 novel Poor Man's Tapestry.

Novels

• The Compleat Bachelor (1901)
• In Accordance with the Evidence (1910)
• The Story of Ragged Robyn (1912)
• Gray Youth (1913)
• The Debit Account (1913)
• The Story of Louie (1913)
• Mushroom Town (1914)
• The New Moon: A Romance of Reconstruction (1918)
• A Case in Camera (1920)
• The Tower of Oblivion (1921)
• The Spite of Heaven (1926)
• The Open Secret (1930)
• A Certain Man (1932)
• Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939)
• Poor Man's Tapestry (1946)
• Arras of Youth (1949)
• A Penny for the Harp (1952)
• Bells Rung Backward (1953)
• A Shilling to Spend (1965)
• Catalan Circus (1969)

Ghost story collections (general collections omitted)

• Back 'O The Moon (1906)
• Widdershins (1911)
• Ghosts in Daylight (1924)
• The Painted Face (1929)
• The Collected Ghost Stories (Nicholson & Watson (London), 1935)
• The Collected Ghost Stories (Tartarus Press
  Tartarus Press
  Tartarus Press is a small, international award-winning, independent small press run by R.B. Russell and Rosalie Parker. It has two distinct specialities....
  
  (Carlton-in-Coverdale, North Yorkshire), 2000; expanded edition)
• The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (Wordsworth Editions (London), 2010; ISBN: 978-1-84022-640-9)

Sources

• Leonard R. N. Ashley, 'Onions, (George) Oliver (1873–1961)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Oliver Onions http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/o/oliver-onions/

External links

• The Beckoning Fair One – text available online as part of Nina Auerbach's course reading