Widdershins

The First Book of Ghost Stories

By: Oliver Onions

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Rosalyn Landor, Stefan Rudnicki

At first blush, Widdershins is a conventional haunted house story involving an unsuccessful writer, who moves into an empty house in 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 interpreted 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 psychotic subject’s point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist’s mind is terrifying in either case.

Public Domain (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

Oliver Onions- explorer of borders and gateways

Masterful and unusual. Not all ghost stories, but something uncanny, surprising in each one of them. The tension is sometimes hidden in the wording or some dark corner, not readily obvious. I remember "The Beckoning Fair One" from an anthology of ghost stories I read in midsummer in my youth and then it impressed me as much as Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows", considered by HP Lovecraft the greatest weird story. Blackwood, on the other hand, as also mentioned in this recording, said that first story in this collection was the greatest ghost story in the English language! I value the words of those better known masters in relation to Oliver Onions. "The Beckoning Fair One" I enjoyed as much as when I read it first. Each of the other stories are interesting in their own way. The readers all made this a wonderfully atmospheric listening experience.