The Beckoning Fair One

A chilling novella about a writer's move into a flat and his quick descent into lunacy. I can see why this classic is still being recommended today: it set the table for many such stories to come, and yet doesn't feel dated or overly familiar. Onions is a splendid writer: he gets right into his prot......more

What really makes this story is how what's terrifying about the ghost is how its influence affects the mind and moods of the characters... Over and above shadows and bumps in the night, it's the depression and despair that accompany its presence. A writer rents out a suite in a decrepit and long-empt......more

The Beckoning Fair One by the English writer Oliver Onions, is said to be one of the best classic horror novellas, and is often to be found in anthologies of either horror or ghost stories. Oliver Onions wrote over 40 novels, and six collections of popular ghost stories and weird fiction, although T......more

"['To let' boards] resembled nothing so much as a row of wooden choppers, ever in the act of falling upon some passer-by, yet never cutting off a tenant for the old house from the stream of his fellows." I've been reading ghost stories since the beginning of Autumn and I'm not going to review most of......more

This is a good macabre novella, a subtle story with an unreliable narrator that may or may not be supernatural in nature. It's one of the earliest examples of a writer-going-crazy-or-is-he stories that Stephen King (and a zillion others) have published, not to mention the inclusion of a woman-in-ref......more