Product Description

_The Beckoning Fair One_ is sometimes called the greatest ghost story in the English language; it may well be; certainly it is one of the quietest and most beautiful supernatural tales ever written. It reminds us of Shirley Jackson's _The Haunting of Hill House_ -- and that's huge praise indeed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3405294 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 124 pages

Customer Reviews

Chilling Onions
"The Beckoning Fair One" has become regarded as a classic 'ghost' story, and very deservedly so. Too many supernatural/ghost/horror stories end up focussing myopically on the details of the horror, which however well delineated still leans toward the boring. To be truly engaging and satisfying a story--even a horror story--needs to be about people. The very horror itself must relate to the human condition in an intelligible way. Oliver Onions knew that, and makes his famous story work precisely because of what it reveals about the dark potentials in seemingly upright people.

Occasionally Onions gets rather too verbose, making some readers rather impatient to get on with it. But I believe that Onions knew exactly what he was doing, and everything in the story serves a distinct and definite purpose. I can say about "The Beckoning Fair One" what I can say about only a few other horror tales I've ever read: that a point came in the story where the hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end, and chills rippled down my back. The fact that he built the mood and then brought in the scare so artfully that I never saw it coming, earns Onions a special place on my list of favorite 'ghostly' authors.

Creepy and Colossal!
I came across this title in David G. Hartwell's 'The Dark Descent' and thought it one of the best stories in that collection. It is the tale of a writer who becomes obsessed with the female ghost haunting the house he rents. He gradually loses contact with the world outside, including a woman who is his friend. The horror is subtle, slowly getting under your skin and building to a shocking climax. This book contains only this story, but for me the purchase was worth it.

Classic genre tale, which you can get for free elsewhere
Oliver Onions is one of the great but under-appreciated weird writers of his generation. Everything in his collection "Widdershins" is superlative. However, this story and all of the other stories in "Widdershins" are in the public domain and can be downloaded and sent to your Kindle for free. Naturally, if readers want to pay so exorbitantly for the convenience of clicking a button, instead of getting the same text for free by clicking six buttons, so be it.