Onions wrote a collection of ghost stories under the title Widdershins. While the book is largely forgotten and out of print, the story The Beckoning Fair One is widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case. (The text is available online as part of Nina Auerbach's course reading (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~nauerbac/onions.html).)
Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, but continued to publish ghost stories, mysteries, and historical fiction, as OliverOnions.
In 1909, Onions married the writer Berta Ruck (1878-1978).
The OliverOnions Papers comprises.3 linear feet of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, travel journals and ephemera related to the British novelist and short story writer OliverOnions (1872-1961).
OliverOnions has long been acknowledged by aficionados of supernatural writing as an elegant and accomplished practitioner; the eerie and beautifully-crafted The Beckoning Fair One is perhaps the best known and certainly the most anthologised of his stories.
One of Onions great strengths, but perhaps also one of the reasons why the majority of his ghost stories have been overlooked, is that they are not easy to categorise; their settings vary greatly, they have a broad frame of reference and the traditionally supernatural content is sometimes minimal.
Tartarus Press offers in its second printing of OliverOnion's Ghost Stories a generous collection of superbly written tales of supernatural invasion, psychological unease, and transitory shifts between the everyday and supernatural - reality and the surreal both concepts presented by the author as paradoxical effects of the same cause.
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