The Man in the Shadows

Oliver Onions, who lived from 1873 to 1961, was a prolific writer of mysteries, social comedies and historical novels, but today he is chiefly remembered for his ghost stories. In that intense flowering of British supernatural fiction during the two decades before World War I, Onions stands just below M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. His most famous collection, “Widdershins” (1911), features such anthology standards as “Rooum” (in which a man is haunted by an entity that can pass, painfully, through his body) and “The Lost Thyrsus,” as powerful a depiction of female ecstasy (or madness?) as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Most famously, “Widdershins” contains “The Beckoning Fair One,” a novella judged by many connoisseurs as the greatest classical ghost story of them all, rivaled only by Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.”