As I am attending the World Fantasy Convention, I’m setting the remainder of our Halloween treats to publish automatically while I am away. These are all classic scary stories we hope you will enjoy. We also hope you will take time to keep updated on Prime Books’ current and future offerings.
Oliver Onions: The Beckoning Fair One
Oliver Onions(13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961), and English author, published over forty novels and story collections. He wrote detective and historical fiction, even a science fiction novel. Among his several collections of ghost stories, the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, which still stands as one of the best examples of psychological horror. To quote Wikipedia:
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 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.
