Widdershins

The finest psychological horror novella in the English language, bar none. Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One" is the slow burn that Stephen King wishes he'd written a dozen times over. A struggling writer, desperate for inspiration, retreats to the quiet rooms of an otherwise empty house. At first, the isolation works wonders his creativity awakens, his prose sharpens. But something else has awakened too. Or perhaps nothing has. That's the genius: the reader can never be certain whether a vengeful feminine spirit is slowly possessing the protagonist, or whether the disintegration is entirely, terribly real in the clinical sense. Onions maps the collapse of a human mind with such surgical precision that each page feels like watching a glass shatter in extreme slow motion. The ambiguity is the horror. TheBeckoning Fair One works whether you believe in ghosts or not, which is precisely why it has haunted readers for over a century.