A Great Overlooked Author
Feb. 28th, 2005 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesThis post is a slightly tweaked version of something I wrote on my lj today, so apologies to any of you on my friends list...
Do any of you share my fondness for the Edwardian author Oliver Onions? A collection of his ghost stories, Widdershins, is available online here. I read his best-known story, The Beckoning Fair One, during my teens but my memory of it had not prepared me for the beauty of Onions' writing, which struck me when I re-read the story the other day. If you're going to insist on putting a surname like his to your ghost stories, you'd better be good, and Onions is +very+ good. His talent for evoking an atmosphere of mingled beauty and unease, then nurturing that malaise into full-blown horror in the hothouse of some ten to twenty pages of elegant fiction, is at least the equal of Benson's or Arthur Machen's, his descriptions of natural beauty are subtle but vivid, and he writes on some of my favourite themes - the play between the good and evil faces of Nature, which are never really that distinct from each other, the power of love over death, and the soft clinging fingers of the past.
His heroes tend to be the sort of people I like, too: quiet, gentle men of moderate means who are disciplined in the pursuit of art and romantic to the core in the best sense of the word. My favourite story in the collection is IO, I think, partly because I love to see Edwardian authors go all pagan. I would also love to see Onions become more popular!
Do any of you share my fondness for the Edwardian author Oliver Onions? A collection of his ghost stories, Widdershins, is available online here. I read his best-known story, The Beckoning Fair One, during my teens but my memory of it had not prepared me for the beauty of Onions' writing, which struck me when I re-read the story the other day. If you're going to insist on putting a surname like his to your ghost stories, you'd better be good, and Onions is +very+ good. His talent for evoking an atmosphere of mingled beauty and unease, then nurturing that malaise into full-blown horror in the hothouse of some ten to twenty pages of elegant fiction, is at least the equal of Benson's or Arthur Machen's, his descriptions of natural beauty are subtle but vivid, and he writes on some of my favourite themes - the play between the good and evil faces of Nature, which are never really that distinct from each other, the power of love over death, and the soft clinging fingers of the past.
His heroes tend to be the sort of people I like, too: quiet, gentle men of moderate means who are disciplined in the pursuit of art and romantic to the core in the best sense of the word. My favourite story in the collection is IO, I think, partly because I love to see Edwardian authors go all pagan. I would also love to see Onions become more popular!
